Based on the prior thread regarding the design flaws related to the security arround account access and fund transfers, I enabled whatever notifications were avaialable for my brokerage and bank accounts. As I’ve had the need to actually use some of these capabilities, I’ve been able to see some of the notification alerts generated by these systems. Those related to notifications of logins appear to work well and within 30 seconds to 2 minutes, which is defensible based on the speed at which your preferred email provider processes incoming mail through their spam filters before delivering to your inbox.
Notifications related to actual account activity are far more diverse in timeliness and value. Perhaps the most useless, if not actually confusing, are the funds transfer notifications provided by Merrill Lynch / BOA. Here’s a case in point. I had a Certificate of Deposit of dollar amount $X purchased through ML at some remote bank mature on 9/12/2024. As part of a different tracking process related to CDs, ML sent an email warning of that looming maturity one month prior to the date (probably too early). I watch my maturies in a home-grown app so I had my own reminder on 9/12 to log in and find something new to do with the money.
I logged in on 9/12 and bought two different CDs at two different banks for amounts $Y and $Z (neither $Y or $Z equal to $X).
On 9/13 at 1:36am, I received an email from ML with clickable links to the prospectus documents for the two new CDs. That gap makes sense because they likely wait until the end of trading to see which trades / purchases “stuck” after users potentially cancelled trades prior to execution, etc.
On 9/14 at 7:56am, I received an email from ML with the subject of
Account alert: New funds credit
with the following content:
New credits have posted to your CMA-Edge account ending in 8A9B Account: CMA-Edge account ending in 8A9B When: September 14, 2024 at 03:01 AM ET [View Account Alerts.](https://olui2.fs.ml.com/Alerts/AccountAlerts.aspx) For more information, you may visit your Merrill Edge account online or contact Merrill Edge directly. The Merrill Edge Help Desk is available at 1.877.653.4732.
There are a variety of problems with this notification.
- the body of the message says the credit originated at 3:01am EDT
- the email shows the email itself was originated at 7:56am
- that means their internal system either queued alert generation for nearly 8 hours or the alert mechanism is batch driven rather than real-time
- the alert itself says NOTHING else about the transaction – if it included the amount, the diligent account owner with some short term memory could be saved the hassle of logging into the portal if they knew that amount matched a recent action they initiated involving that amount
- when I actually logged into the ML account at 2:00pm CDT on 9/14/2024, there is NO activity shown in the account for the date of 9/14/2024 at all
- when I looked in the online portal’s notification “inbox”, a notification there DID reference the 9/14/2024 3:01am datetime from the email and referenced an amount of $X – the amount of the incoming redemption of the CD that matured on 9/12
I understand that redemption of a CD from a bank that is not BOA into a Merrill Lynch account may involve “holds” and delays between the paper date of maturity and the funds of that CD being pushed back to ML from the remote bank. That’s what this notification was essentially conveying. But it is needlessly confusing to not log events in the Activity summary with dates that correspond to these housekeeping events.
The point of all of this is this…
If you enable these alerts, you may want to try a few test transactions by moving money back and forth between some accounts to “preview” the results generated by your combination of banks to acclimate yourself to the noise and poorly timed / poorly worded content headed your way.
And these banks have a long way to go. We live in a 2024, 24x365, instantaneous digital world. Banks still live in a 1960s, COBOL-is-king land that time and technology forgot… With a fancy web portal interface hiding the archaic systems still in use.
WTH