u/tampaite

Can someone share their new account opening experience in 2026?

How quickly were you able to open and fund it? Was it seamless or did you get heartburn?

Day 01: Submitted an application to open a regular brokerage account.

Day 03: Still waiting - on hold for 30 min just to talk to the account activation team. Finally, spoke to someone and they mentioned since I have a credit freeze, it's being sent to another team and then after about 10 min the team approved.

Opening a new account has been painful.

• First they want you to upload your DL and validate your selfie and the AI is not able to compare your selfie with DL.
• Then you have to upload your selfie holding your DL onto Docusign.
• Then you have to call customer service to validate it.
• Then customer service will have you go back to Docusign.
• Then you have to upload your DL again.
• Then you have to call customer service to validate it again.

The New Accounts Team will take 2-3 days for identity verification.

You have to then call customer service after 3 days to verify if account was set-up correctly and if PROMO code was applied, when asked why ETrade cannot send an automated alert(SMS or email) once identity verification is complete, the customer agent said maybe I should look into opening an account with wealth management at Morgan Stanley instead.

Overall, account opening process gets a B-