Originally Posted by
Wyfind
Judging from all of our experiences, I think it's safe to say the rollout of this program is god awful. I had a similarly confusing experience today.
I visited the new JPMorgan financial center (former First Republic Bank headquarters) in San Francisco. Everyone I met kept stressing to me that the branch and program is a "pilot" and that everything is "new." In short, no one seemed to know what they were doing.
I met a banker who looked up my Chase account and told me I qualified for JPMorgan Private Client. She was surprised I had self-directed, no-AUM fee investment accounts assigned to a JPMorgan advisor already. She told me it wasn't necessary for me to transfer more funds to JPMorgan (although, no surprise, she insisted she would be happy to help there) or have my investment accounts managed by an advisor for a fee, when I confirmed I really did have investment accounts with no AUM and already had an advisor (and retail bank Chase banker). She said she would talk to my two bankers because she didn't want to "step on any toes," which makes me wonder if she has to take over the accounts. I let her know I'm happy with both and my only "financial goal" was to get the JPMorgan Reserve credit card. She said it seemed do-able and pledged to get back to me next week.
Honestly, I don't think the JPM Reserve Card is worth the hassle. It's not like the difference between it and the CSR is comparable to that of Centurion vs Platinum. I emailed the banker and the advisor that I don't want to keeping meeting anymore and they didn't press. They just asked why. I get the feeling that from our previous meetings they didn't think they'd get much value from me either. It looks to me that whoever designed the program clearly wanted to steer people toward manged account but they didn't have anything exciting to dole out. The people with ~1mm has very different aptitude toward managed accounts compared to the people with > 10mm, for whom maybe the whole financial advisor thing might actually make sense as their time is too valuable to be doing things like logging onto an website and clicking a few links...