Owning stocks or having a brokerage account isn’t just for the ultra-rich.
More than half of U.S. households have retirement accounts (IRA or 401k). About 62% of Americans own stocks. About 28% of American adults own cryptocurrencies.
People with money invested in major brokerage companies, traditional and crypto, often interact with those companies through their websites and mobile apps, so these online interactions play a large role in the attitudes of customers toward their brokerage companies.
To understand the quality of this online experience, we used MUiQ to collect UX benchmark metrics on 11 popular brokerage websites and mobile apps in 2025.
- Ally Invest
- Charles Schwab
- Coinbase
- Edward Jones
- E-Trade
- Fidelity
- J.P. Morgan
- Merrill Lynch
- Robinhood
- TD Ameritrade (Note: Acquired by Charles Schwab in 2020, discontinued in May 2024)
- Vanguard
We computed SUPR-Q® and Net Promoter scores, investigated reasons for using the websites, measured users’ attitudes regarding their experiences, conducted key driver analyses, and analyzed reported usability problems. (Full details are in the downloadable report.)
Benchmark Study Details
In March 2025, we asked 508 U.S. users of brokerage websites to recall their most recent experience of one of the brokerage websites on their desktop and mobile app (if applicable) in the past year. Most respondents rated themselves as either novice (43%) or intermediate (45%) investors with funds in a wide variety of products (e.g., retirement IRA/401k: 73%, stocks: 68%, crypto: 49%).
Respondents completed the eight-item SUPR-Q (which includes the Net Promoter Score), the two-item UX-Lite®, and the SUPR-Qm standardized questionnaires, and answered questions about their brand attitudes, usage, and prior experiences.
Quality of the Website User Experience: SUPR-Q
The SUPR-Q is a standardized questionnaire widely used for measuring attitudes toward the quality of a website user experience. Its norms are computed from a rolling database of around 200 websites across dozens of industries.
SUPR-Q scores are percentile ranks that tell you how a website’s experience ranks relative to the other websites (50th percentile is average). The SUPR-Q provides an overall score as well as detailed scores for subdimensions of Usability, Trust, Appearance, and Loyalty.
The mean SUPR-Q across brokerage websites in this study was at the 54th percentile. However, there was substantial variation between the sites, with Coinbase having the highest SUPR-Q score (76th percentile) and Merrill Lynch having the lowest SUPR-Q (14th percentile).
Usability Scores
Overall, usability scores were below average for the brokerage websites, averaging at the 39th percentile. Ally Invest had the highest usability score (at the 65th percentile). Merrill Lynch had the lowest usability score, falling in the 3rd percentile. Respondents mentioned having difficulty navigating the Merrill Lynch website due to overwhelming options that took time and effort to sift through.
Comments related to usability on Merrill Lynch included:
“The website is a mess. There’s too much info spread out.”
“Too much unexplained technical jargon.”
Another indicator related to usability is the frequency with which users report contacting customer service in the past year: 8% for Ally Invest and 18% for Merrill Lynch.
Loyalty/Net Promoter Scores
Most of the brokerage websites had positive Net Promoter Scores. The average NPS for this group was 5% (slightly more promoters than detractors), which is above average for Net Promoter Scores in our SUPR-Q database (−6% in 2Q 2025). Coinbase was the most likely to be recommended, with an NPS of 31%, and Merrill Lynch was the least likely to be recommended (−33%).
When looking across SUPR-Q subscales, the brokerage websites had relatively high scores for Loyalty, especially Fidelity (84th percentile) and Coinbase (83rd percentile). Loyalty was lowest for Merrill Lynch (19th percentile).
Unsurprisingly, respondents reported being most likely to continue using Fidelity and least likely to continue using TD Ameritrade (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Likelihood to continue using the websites (90% confidence intervals).
Comments related to NPS and loyalty included:
“Their website is always easy to use. I don’t consider myself to be really knowledgeable when it comes to these types of accounts (401k), but their website helps reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed. Plus, their customer service is excellent and very helpful.” — Fidelity
“I have had a good experience using Coinbase, so I would recommend it to others.” — Coinbase
“It’s not easy to navigate their site, I only have this account because of my employer 401k.” — Merrill Lynch
“It’s an awful website especially when compared to other banks’ websites and I find it next to impossible to find what I want to do. Feels like every feature is buried in several submenus and it takes so long to navigate through.” — Merrill Lynch
Websites and Mobile App Usage
As a part of this benchmark, we asked respondents how they accessed the brokerage websites. All respondents reported using their desktop/laptop computers (this was a requirement for participation in the survey), with 73% also using mobile apps and 54% using mobile websites. Comments about the brokerage websites related to the mobile app usage included:
“It’s an easy app to use and I can easily set up face ID so I don’t have to remember a password, but there is also easy two step authentication that gives peace of mind in regards to security.” — Ally Invest
“I think that the Coinbase mobile app is easier to navigate than the website. I enjoy the tabs to find exactly what you need, I think it’s very easy to understand.” — Coinbase (Figure 2)
Figure 2: Coinbase mobile app ratings reflect a generally positive experience by users (B on the SUPR-Qm grading scale).
“It’s hard to find what I need since there’s so many menus and things to click through to get even simple info.” — Merrill Lynch
“I don’t like that it isn’t easy to access the same full feature set available on the website.” — Merrill Lynch
Most users reported visiting their brokerage websites on a desktop or laptop computer from a few times a month to a few times per year.
Key Drivers of UX Quality
To better understand what affects SUPR-Q scores and Likelihood-to-Recommend (LTR) ratings, we asked respondents to rate potentially important attributes of the brokerage websites on a five-point scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). We conducted key driver analyses (regression modeling) to quantify the extent to which ratings on these items drive (account for) variation in overall SUPR-Q scores and, separately, LTR (the rating from which the NPS is derived; full details are in the downloadable report).
There were ten significant key drivers that accounted for 63% of the variation in SUPR-Q scores. The top key driver of the brokerage website experience was “It’s easy to find what I’m looking for when I visit the website” (accounting for 15% of SUPR-Q variation). Other significant key drivers included “It’s easy to find information I need in my account” (9%) and “I feel like my information is secure on the website” (8%).
We used the same set of predictors to model variation in LTR ratings, with six significant drivers accounting for 52% of its variation. The top key driver in this analysis was “It’s easy to withdraw funds” (10%). The other five drivers were also significant in the analysis of SUPR-Q variation.
Figure 3 shows a scatterplot of the importance and opportunity for improvement for six key drivers (the five that significantly influenced the variation of SUPR-Q and LTR scores and the top LTR driver). The combination of importance and opportunity for improvement provides a basis for prioritizing which key drivers need improvement. The importance score is the average of the variance accounted for by the driver in the SUPR-Q and NPS analyses, where larger percentages indicate more importance. The opportunity score is the top-box percentage for the driver, so smaller percentages indicate greater opportunity for improvement (e.g., it would be harder to improve a driver with a top-box percentage of 100% than one with a top-box percentage of 10%).
Figure 3: Scatterplot of importance and opportunity for improvement of key drivers.
Three of these six key drivers fell in the upper-left quadrant, meaning they have relatively high importance and a greater opportunity for improvement (especially for the ease of researching products, which had a top-box percentage of just 27% overall, ranging from 15% for Merrill Lynch to 38% for TD Ameritrade). The other three had lower importance and less opportunity for improvement (bottom-right quadrant). Because the largest top-box percentage was just 43%, there appears to be a reasonable opportunity for improvement for all six key drivers.
UX Problems
We examined the verbatim comments to better understand the user experience problems. Three themes affected nine of the eleven websites: website responsiveness, difficult navigation, and issues accessing accounts. Other themes reported for most of the websites included complex information, difficult-to find-information, underwhelming design, cluttered user interface, and issues with withdrawals/transfers.
Website Responsiveness
Respondents reported problems with website responsiveness for Ally Invest, Charles Schwab, Coinbase, Edward Jones, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Robinhood, and TD Ameritrade.
Comments related to website responsiveness included:
“Ally in general has had some downtime issues lately, or times when various parts of the site aren’t working.” — Ally Invest
“Sometimes I have to slow down and let the information load in order to continue.” — Edward Jones
“It’s not fast enough.” — Robinhood
Difficult Navigation
Respondents reported problems with difficult navigation for Ally Invest, Coinbase, E-Trade, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, and Vanguard.
Comments related to difficult navigation included:
“Difficult to navigate to certain items, such as performance of a stock on day/week and in past 1, 3, and 6 months (instead of YTD/1 year).” — E-Trade
“Navigation needs guidance, it is not straight forward.” — Charles Schwab
“I feel like a number of activities shouldn’t take 6–7 clicks to get to and need to be more streamlined.” — Vanguard (Figure 4)
Figure 4: Example of high-level navigation options that may require too many steps.
Issues Accessing Accounts
Respondents reported problems with their accounts for Ally Invest, Charles Schwab, Coinbase, Edward Jones, E-Trade, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, TD Ameritrade, and Vanguard.
Comments related to account access included:
“I have had issues with password resets in the past. I would have to call cs [customer service] to do the full reset, and it did not align with my work schedule, so I was locked out of my account for a little while. That was definitely frustrating.” — Fidelity
“Sometimes logging in can be a hassle but I suppose it’s for my own good as they are to make my account secure.” — Coinbase
“Since J.P. Morgan makes security a high priority it can get frustrating to log into account because of steps and verification in place to stop any interaction that might get flagged as fraudulent activity…” — J.P. Morgan
Summary and Takeaways
An analysis of the user experience of 11 brokerage websites found:
- Making money in stocks isn’t easy, and neither is using many brokerage websites. While the brokerage websites in this study collectively had SUPR-Q scores slightly above average (54th percentile), Coinbase had a respectable score (76th percentile) while Merrill Lynch was well below average (3rd percentile). These websites were also the most and least likely to be recommended (Coinbase NPS: 31%; Merrill Lynch NPS: −33%).
- Ease of finding information drives UX scores. Our key driver models accounted for 63% of the variation in SUPR-Q scores and 52% of the variation in LTR ratings. The top key driver of the brokerage website experience was “It’s easy to find what I’m looking for when I visit the website” (accounting for 15% of SUPR-Q variation). Other significant key drivers included “It’s easy to find information I need in my account” (9%) and “I feel like my information is secure on the website” (8%). The top key driver in the LTR ratings was “It’s easy to withdraw funds” (10%).
- There is an industry-wide opportunity to improve the ease of researching investment products. This was a significant key driver across the brokerage websites, accounting for 8% of the variation in SUPR-Q scores and 7% of the variation in LTR ratings. Of the most important key drivers, the top-box score for the ease of researching investment products was just 27% overall, ranging from 15% for Merrill Lynch to 38% for TD Ameritrade. It may be difficult to develop better research tools, but our models indicate that such effort would likely improve the UX of brokerage websites.
- The top UX problems reported by users were website responsiveness, difficult navigation, and issues accessing accounts. These issues were reported for nine of the eleven websites included in the study (in various combinations). Other problems reported for most of the websites included complex information, difficult-to-find information, underwhelming design, cluttered user interface, and issues with withdrawals/transfers.
For more details, see the downloadable report.
