Hello, Important to know, I live in Germany, so I think after Brexit the responsable IBKR location is Ireland. With beginning this year, I founded a new company (German GmbH) for professional trading. Immediately after, I requested a new IBKR account. Now, after more than 40 days (!!!), the application is still being processed. It is to cry for. The communication with the new accounting team is annoying. Questions are asked that were answered weeks ago. Customer support said, that they are completely overwhelmed right now. For me this is a nightmare. I made 0 trades this year. Has anyone had similar experiences here? Thank you! Robert
I am with BMO Investorline and I got an email from them saying that their trading volume is up 2.5x due to COVID and they have moved lots of the banking employees to the brokerage to handle the volume of new accounts. I think most brokerages are in the same boat - huge volume of new accounts.
aaaaaaa Hahahaha Welcome to the post-Brexit, post-Gamestop, pandemic world. You gotta be vetted by nine different agencies to make sure you're not a terrorist or drug dealer. Just kidding. I have no idea why it's taking so long. Unless maybe... IBKR is a large multinational corporation that doesn't really give a hoot about individual retail traders. You get what you pay for, Dude. BMK
On Monday I had my account open after waiting for 2 weeks. It was painful, unnecessarily painful. I don't know how many times I tried to call them, no one answered. The web chat kept spinning and didn't connect to anyone, totally useless. Apparently funded accounts are given priority but they come with an extra hassle, if you try to withdraw out of frustration they show you a red message saying that 'your username is not allowed to withdraw'. At some point in the application process I got ignored from all options and funds were stuck. Eventually they completed whatever they were doing and opened the account.
Based on everything I have heard over the last few months, I wouldn't touch IBKR with a ten-foot pole
Sorry to hear you guys are having problems. Realistically - every broker has problems once in a while. Happy customer here, but my account was opened many years ago. While other brokers were all other the news with outages during a few big volatility spikes last year IB handled my orders just fine. There were only couple of days with partial data outages, which is really minor compared with inability to trade or even close positions. I'm on IB Pro if that matters.
That's one funny remark. What is it you use, Robinhood lol? IB is the gold standard of online brokers for serious investors. Just don't expect to be baby-sat if you don't know what you're doing. Well, if you like 8% margin loans and your order flow sold to the big boyz, then by all means go elsewhere. No affiliation whatsoever, I'm just a customer.
Got the same problem, applied for a german corporate account and submitted all neccesary documents. On the site it says only that my account has been submitted for approval, but any inquiries I sent are not being answered yet. It also says if the account gets funded the approval will be expedited, but I dont want to send any money until the account is set up. Besides, I am a long-term IB Pro customer with and just want to transfer the funds to the new account.
I wouldn't be surprised if the brexit mess plus lockdowns causing retail trading surge, is slowing them and other brokers down.
I'm sure thats one of the reasons (Complicance). It is unbelievable how much information they collect. All of that will probably be checked. Brexit, Covid, Retail-Trader-Boom, Compliance-Checks will probably be the reasons for the delay. But however > 40 days waiting time is too much and not acceptable.