An Open Letter to TD Bank: Your Branch Reps Are Criminally Undertrained And You Should Feel Bad. (2024)

I’m writing this now, on a Sunday morning, because I am so &*^%$ fed up I just need to get this out of my system.

Hopefully this will help others who get hit with a family health disaster avoid a morass of unnecessary, head-exploding stress & inconvenience during one of the most emotionally draining periods of their lives.

First , some context ...

Last May, my otherwise healthy mother was informed that she might have cancer, based on some conspicuous results from a routine blood test.

She died on October 15.

I won’t go into detail about the horrors of the months in between, but suffice to say there was never even a shred of hope from the first call from her doctor until her death. My brothers and I just had to watch our mother fall apart, lose her mind, and waste away over a matter of weeks while I scrambled to find adequate palliative care and eventually hospice for her.

At the same time, I also had to sort out care for our father, who has mid-stage mixed dementia and can’t take care of himself (my mother had been caring for him and refusing outside help up until this point).

And on top of THAT, my Dad also spontaneously lost his ability to walk due to severe spinal stenosis no more than three weeks after my mother first found out she might have cancer.

So I've spent this past summer back in my hometown, scrambling to care for both parents, find quality care for both parents, and sort out their affairs before both became legally incapable and/or dead.

But as hard as this summer has been, I can say without question the people who caused me the most hardship — purely out of professional incompetence — have been the representatives at my parent’s local TD Canada Trust branch.

If you take anything away from this random LinkedIn rant, it’s this:

Branch representatives at retail banks are criminally undertrained and shouldn’t be allowed to touch anything associated with power of attorney or estate management, period.

Should you ever have to sort out Power of Attorney for Property for a loved one at a retail bank, please heed this advice:

Insist on ONLY working with the top-level manager of your loved one’s local bank branch and no one else.

Insist that they are the only one you work with, and that you can call and email them as needed.

DO NOT let random retail branch associates get anywhere near your loved one's financial affairs.

I cannot stress this enough: They are not adequately trained to handle it, and they will only cause you extra grief when you’re drowning in grief already.

If you’re curious, here’s a short (actually quite long) list of what I've had to deal with getting my Power of Attorney status sorted at TD Bank thus far:

1. When I showed up to my first appointment to start the POA filing process back in June, the TD associate I was dealing with wasn’t even familiar with the term “Power of Attorney for Property.” (No, I am not joking).He asked me "if there’s another term for it, that he might have heard of.”And when I said, “... Durable Power of Attorney?” he exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s the one!” as if we were playing a game of Trivial Pursuit, instead of sorting out the finances of a complicated, tragic family health crisis I was actively living through.
2. This TD rep then said he’d file my papers with the legal department that processes POAs and would notify me when it was completed. He never did.
3. After chasing him down in-person to get an update (after several weeks of radio silence), he looks into it and lets me know that “um, they messed up somewhere, and they don’t have your papers on file, so we have to re-do it.”
4. He then re-files all my papers, assuring me that everything is sorted correctly now and I will get confirmation of my POA status “soon” and everything will be fine from there.[ At this point, I should clarify that the reason I’d been rushing to get my POA status sorted was because before my mother lost her cognitive ability, she wanted to change her will to leave money in a Henson trust for her disabled granddaughter (my niece). But then she went into liver failure and lost her ability to write and sign documents — including the codicil of her will, which was still being drafted. So as POA, I had to rush to set up a trust outside of her will in her name while she was still alive. Which I could only do with POA status at both of my parents’ investment and retail banks. So I was essentially in a race against Death to fulfill my mom’s wishes. Okay, back to my play-by-play of TD’s professional incompetence … ]
5. In the meantime, I manage to pay my parents’ bills through my mother’s online bank account, since she’d thankfully given me her login credentials when she was still lucid. But then, suddenly, out of the blue, the login stops working, for reasons unknown.
6. I go back to the bank to pay some bills in-person, since I have no other choice. I am then asked by a different teller for my “POA access card.” Apparently I was supposed to be given one when my POA status was approved (I wasn’t). I can’t do anything on either parent’s behalf until I get one. I have to set up another appointment to get the card.
7. I go back to the bank again to get an access card, once again dealing with a different representative, which means I have to bring all my papers and explain everything from the very beginning for the umpteenth time. Throughout all this, I’ve been calling and emailing the original rep who started the POA filing to get help and confirm that there won't be any other blockers that might cause delays because my mother may die literally any day now.He never responds. I find out later he went on vacation and failed to put any kind of auto-responder on his work email account or clarification of his absence on his voicemail.
8. I am assured — again, by yet another TD representative — that everything should be fine now and I should be able to bank on my parents’ behalf. I am finally able to get funds transferred from my parents’ investment bank into their TD bank account so I can move money into the Henson trust for my niece.A TD rep issues me a money order and I attempt to deposit it into my niece’s trust account. I find out the TD rep put the wrong name on the order so it can’t be deposited. I have to go back again and get it redone.
9. I also call TD customer support to find out why I can’t log in to my mother’s online account anymore. They ask for the telephone banking passcode for my POA access card. I have no idea what it is, because I was never told to make one. I get stonewalled AGAIN and they tell me to go back to the bank to get a passcode for telephone banking.
10. I show up at the same TD bank branch, papers in tow, for easily the 12th time in 5 weeks. At this point the manager of the branch takes me aside and says she’ll help me personally. She’s seen me come and go so many times at this point she’s taken pity on me and apologizes profusely.
11. She digs into the backend of my file and discovers that the reason I can’t log in to my mother’s online account is because the original TD rep who started the POA process terminated it without telling me or anyone else. He just closed my dying mother’s account and went on vacation.
12. The bank manager issues me a new access card and hands me over to a representative to setup the online and telephone banking passcodes. Before I leave, I ask the representative if the card I’ve been issued will work for banking on behalf of my mother AND my father, since my mother is going to die soon and I still need to bank on my father’s behalf.She assures me it will. I explicitly ask her again, emphasizing how important it is that she not give me incorrect information. She says, don’t worry, this card will definitely work for banking on behalf of both parents since it’s a joint account and I have POA for both parents.
13. Weeks later, back in BC, after my mother has died, I go to another TD branch to begin the executorship process. I book the appointment on a Saturday and include a note that the appointment is for estate banking for a deceased parent. When I get there, the representative says the first step of the process is talking to TD’s estate department, so she calls them.They’re closed on the weekend.It turns out even knowing basic information like the hours of the department we need to talk to for the purpose of my appointment was beyond the pay grade and training of TD branch employees.
14. Now, on top of it all, I find out today that by notifying TD that my mother is dead, my POA access card has been voided because —surprise! —despite my most dogged efforts to get accurate, trustworthy information from a TD Bank employee weeks beforehand, it turns out that the access card I was issued in fact does NOT allow me to bank on behalf of both parents, even though I do have POA for both parents.

So now, after months of mismanagement, I’m back on the other side of the country from my parent's home branch, once again locked out of my their accounts until TD’s estate department calls me and sorts it out.

Okay, I’m done ranting. But this has to change. I know it’s common knowledge that the expertise of branch employees is abysmal compared to decades ago, and that the vast majority of them are unqualified to do anything beyond basic account administration and hawking the latest financial product.

But even if this is the case, branch employees should at least be trained to say that legal matters such as Power of Attorney are not within their purview, and assign it to someone experienced enough to handle them (aka the senior-most employee/manager).

Most people trying to get Power of Attorney sorted at the bank are caregivers who are already struggling under the burden of a loved one’s failing health (and within this segment, I imagine a huge proportion of these are caregivers for a parent or elder relative with dementia, which is a relentlessly exhausting ordeal in and of itself).These people are stressed the f*ck out. The last thing they need is an endless parade of hapless, untrained sales reps mishandling their file so they can't get the funds they need to pay off debts and secure quality care.

Establishing Power of Attorney for both Personal Care and Property is one of the most critical tasks a caregiver needs to do to be able to secure resources and help their loved one.The entire process should be handled with sensitivity and efficiency — not appalling, clownish incompetence.

It’s inexcusable, TD Canada Trust, and you should be ashamed.