I called last week to close my Access Investing account and the rep started off saying I could just close out the positions myself through the portal. Once we got past the initial confusion that this was an Access Investing account and not an Access Direct account the rep said that they would continue to service the accounts with Morgan Stanley, but after putting me on hold for a while to research what process he needed to follow he couldn't close the account because they have to submit the liquidation execution orders during market open hours. (Error on my part)

When I called today I mentioned the E*Trade news as the reason for wanting to close my account and the rep made a comment along the lines of "Yeah, we don't have all the details about how that's all going to work when this all becomes Core Portfolios next year, but they did say everything would be moving." He was able to close out my account in just a few minutes without having to put me on hold, so I don't know if that means he's more familiar with the product or just this part of the process.

I think this highlights the general issue of interacting with Morgan Stanley through the call centers. You can call 3 times and somehow end up with 4 conflicting answers by the time you're done.

For them to maintain accounts on both the E*Trade and Morgan Stanley side of the house they'd have to re-tool a MSO UI to interface with the existing Core Portfolios robo advisor APIs on the E*Trade side. I would be surprised if they would commit to that development effort moving forward, as they are only publicly announcing that they are assigning resources to augmenting the E*Trade Core Portfolios automation to have features missing from Access Investing like auto tax loss harvesting. A simple re-custodian of the holdings over to E*Trade seems like the path of least resistance here.