CB Investment, Insurance and Financial Merrill Lynch Complaints #2-21

Merrill Lynch review: Shocked that anyone would want to keep their funds at this institution

John R V of US

Jul 27, 2026 11:20 pm UTC

Verified customer

Featured review

My father had the incredible misfortune of having the company holding his Roth IRA acquired by Bank of America and subsequently transferred to Merrill Lynch when it was also acquired by Bank of America during 2008 Great Financial Crisis. Either BoA or Merrill lost my father's account paperwork including his beneficiary forms and literally every document related to his account since its creation other than a 2010 options application. Unfortunately, in January of 2023 my father passed away suddenly due to Covid 19 without a will. Due to ML having no records of my father's beneficiary paperwork, a rep from ML directed my father's heirs to probate court. Due to probate court complications, I was eventually made the administrator of my father's estate but Merrill Lynch did not want to transfer the funds in my father's IRA to the estate in accordance with Texas Probate Law due to Merrill Lynch governing documents stating that without assigned beneficiaries, all assets would be transferred to the surviving spouse if there was one.

This would have been fine, except Merrill Lynch had no record of my father ever signing any document agreeing to this policy or actually signing any document in their possession, ever. After being this account being held at BoA since 2004, and with ML since 2008, these firms had not a single signed document from my father or any account application or any correspondence at all other than the aforementioned options application for over 2 decades.

After spending 3 years in probate court, spending over $20K on legal fees, the probate court ordered Merrill Lynch to transfer my father's IRA to the estate and distribute to his heirs.

That was in May of this year. Since then, Merrill Lynch representatives have sandbagged beneficiary inherited Roth IRA account creation and repeatedly delayed the account transfers. ML representatives have repeatedly misrepresented timelines and lied about the transfer process and status. I have been told multiple time to expect transfer by "CoB today", "CoB Friday", "2-3 days", "3-5 days", "next week" and after 2 months, the account transfer is still incomplete.

For comparison, my father had multiple IRAs held at other institutions of similar age. They all had beneficiary paperwork and account transfers were completed within 1 week after inherited IRA paperwork was submitted.

This is absolutely baffling behavior and absurdly poor operations for a once prestigious wealth management firm. No surprise to me seeing a 1.5 star overall rating coming here to leave a review and honestly shocked that anyone would want to keep their funds at this institution after experiencing a level of ineptness and deceit from a fiduciary organization.

Recommendation: Have a will, make sure you have beneficiaries on ALL your accounts, and consolidate your accounts at an institution that you trust.

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Merrill Lynch Contacts

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4 World Financial Center, 250 Vesey Street, New York, New York, 10080, United States

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Jul 28, 2026
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