Alert: Fidelity Cash Management Account Extended Hold Times & Billpay Cancellations

A lot of people like to use the Fidelity Cash Management Account in place of an ordinary checking account. Unfortunately, beginning a few days ago the account has been wonky with deposits, transfers and bill payments.

Many people are seeing recently that their Fidelity Cash Management Account (CMA) is holding funds on their ACH pulls into the account. When initiating from within a Fidelity a pull from an external bank account, Fidelity will quote an availability date of a few weeks later instead of the typical timeframe of a day or a few days. Even funds pushed into the Fidelity account from an outside account are occasionally getting held up for a few people.

Many reports indicate mobile check deposits being even more problematic with long hold times until the checks clear.

Most surprisingly, some people report getting their bill payments cancelled, e.g. if you have your mortgage set up to be paid from within the Fidelity bill payment system it might not actually get paid.

These measures are all likely fraud algorithms trying to keep criminals at bay. That said, it’s frustrating that Fidelity isn’t doing a better job communicating with their customers. If this continues it can render the CMA no longer suitable as a checking account alternative. Note: many have noted that only transfers to the CMA are sometimes slow while transfers to the brokerage account directly don’t seem to have these issues.

All of these issues seem to be affecting more often those CMAs which are on the newer side. You can read more about user experiences in this DoC comments thread and on this long Reddit thread. Let us know your own experiences in the comments below.