So Thursday after my last monologue on TD and their RDSP Program, I received a phone call from a 1-800 number at my office (you know for my real job). Surprisingly I get a lot of “phone spam” at my office, so normally I don’t answer such calls, however I did answer and I was shocked to be speaking to someone from the TD/Waterhouse team that wanted to talk to me about my RDSP posts.
My first reaction was fear that TD had unleashed one of their Media Piranha (or worse one of their Great White Shark Lawyers) on me, but no this gentleman was very polite and cordial. My next reaction was, how the heck did you guys sleuth from my On Line Persona of the Big Cajun Man who I really was, but that really isn’t that hard either (not like they needed Sam Spade to figure that one out).
The gentleman on the phone wanted to chat with me about my post about RDSPs, so I actually jumped on that and pretty much regurgitated my posts and my concerns about being able to do anything on-line (and I also outlined how painful it had been to set up the account in the first place). I must admit the gentleman was quite patient listening to my diatribe about my woes with the system, but I actually got a very plausible explanation on why I couldn’t do what I want.
Simply put, it’s a system flaw, that won’t allow for me to trade within the account or transfer money to the account. The flaw has to do with the account naming, and how the system deals with it (from what I understood this is an issue with a few other account types as well). This seems plausible to me, as I have spoken to various TD folks along the way and they have said to me (in confidence) that there is a great need for a streamlining of how all the TD accounts interact with each other. This arises from the TD/Canada Trust merger and also from an aging infrastructure (this is my conjecture, for any TD folks reading along here). So this is a “system bug” that needs to be remedied before I can do what I want (which is to transfer money in easily, and to make trades in the account as well).
That was the good news, the bad news was that this fix is being included with a larger system change and really won’t be available until the end of 2013 (I won’t comment about my experience as a Program Manager in the Computer business and how deadlines are rarely met). So I will have to wait until early next year before I can do what I want is the message that I got.
NOTE: For now the ONLY way to deal with my son’s RDSP is over the phone, it is not accessible from a TD bank branch either (I was in doing RESP work and asked, and was told, we don’t do that here), so you must use the TD/Waterhouse 24 hour phone folks to do any transactions for your RDSP.
I appreciate the fact that TD reached out to the BCM to explain and possibly placate my rantings, I just wish they could fix this problem sooner.
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