More than half<\/a> of U.S. households have retirement accounts (IRA or 401k). About 62% of Americans<\/a> own stocks. About 28% of American adults<\/a> own cryptocurrencies.<\/p>\n People with money invested in major brokerage companies, traditional and crypto, often interact with those companies through their websites and mobile apps<\/a>, so these online interactions play a large role in the attitudes of customers toward their brokerage companies.<\/p>\n To understand the quality of this online experience, we collected UX benchmark metrics on 11 popular brokerage websites and mobile apps in 2025.<\/p>\n We computed SUPR-Q<\/a>\u00ae<\/sup> and Net Promoter<\/a> scores, investigated reasons for using the websites, measured users\u2019 attitudes regarding their experiences, conducted key driver<\/a> analyses, and analyzed reported usability problems. (Full details are in the downloadable report<\/a>.)<\/p>\n 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%).<\/p>\n Respondents completed the eight-item SUPR-Q<\/a> (which includes the Net Promoter Score<\/a>), the two-item UX-Lite<\/a>\u00ae<\/sup>, and the SUPR-Qm<\/a> standardized questionnaires, and answered questions about their brand attitudes, usage, and prior experiences.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n SUPR-Q scores are percentile ranks that tell you how a website\u2019s experience ranks relative to the other websites (50th<\/sup> percentile is average). The SUPR-Q provides an overall score as well as detailed scores for subdimensions of Usability, Trust, Appearance, and Loyalty.<\/p>\n The mean SUPR-Q across brokerage websites in this study was at the 54th <\/sup>percentile. However, there was substantial variation between the sites, with Coinbase having the highest SUPR-Q score (76th<\/sup> percentile) and Merrill Lynch having the lowest SUPR-Q (14th<\/sup> percentile).<\/p>\n Overall, usability scores were below average for the brokerage websites, averaging at the 39th<\/sup> percentile. Ally Invest had the highest usability score (at the 65th<\/sup> percentile). Merrill Lynch had the lowest usability score, falling in the 3rd<\/sup> percentile. Respondents mentioned having difficulty navigating the Merrill Lynch website due to overwhelming options that took time and effort to sift through.<\/p>\n Comments related to usability on Merrill Lynch included:<\/p>\n \u201cThe website is a mess. There\u2019s too much info spread out.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cToo much unexplained technical jargon<\/em>.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 (\u22126% 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 (\u221233%).<\/p>\n When looking across SUPR-Q subscales, the brokerage websites had relatively high scores for Loyalty, especially Fidelity (84th<\/sup> percentile) and Coinbase (83rd<\/sup> percentile). Loyalty was lowest for Merrill Lynch (19th<\/sup> percentile).<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, respondents reported being most likely to continue using Fidelity and least likely to continue using TD Ameritrade (Figure 1).<\/p>\n Figure 1:<\/strong> Likelihood to continue using the websites (90% confidence intervals).<\/p>\n Comments related to NPS and loyalty included:<\/p>\n \u201cTheir website is always easy to use. I don\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Fidelity<\/p>\n \u201cI have had a good experience using Coinbase, so I would recommend it to others.<\/em>\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Coinbase<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not easy to navigate their site, I only have this account because of my employer 401k.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Merrill Lynch<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an awful website especially when compared to other banks\u2019 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.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Merrill Lynch<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an easy app to use and I can easily set up face ID so I don\u2019t have to remember a password, but there is also easy two step authentication that gives peace of mind in regards to security.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Ally Invest<\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u2019s very easy to understand.<\/em>\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Coinbase (Figure 2)<\/p>\n Figure 2:<\/strong> Coinbase mobile app ratings reflect a generally positive experience by users (B on the SUPR-Qm grading scale<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to find what I need since there\u2019s so many menus and things to click through to get even simple info.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Merrill Lynch<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t like that it isn\u2019t easy to access the same full feature set available on the website.<\/em>\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Merrill Lynch<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n 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 \u201cIt\u2019s easy to find what I\u2019m looking for when I visit the website\u201d (accounting for 15% of SUPR-Q variation). Other significant key drivers included \u201cIt\u2019s easy to find information I need in my account\u201d (9%) and \u201cI feel like my information is secure on the website\u201d (8%).<\/p>\n 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 \u201cIt\u2019s easy to withdraw funds\u201d (10%). The other five drivers were also significant in the analysis of SUPR-Q variation.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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%).<\/p>\n Figure 3:<\/strong> Scatterplot of importance and opportunity for improvement of key drivers.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Respondents reported problems with website responsiveness for Ally Invest, Charles Schwab, Coinbase, Edward Jones, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Robinhood, and TD Ameritrade.<\/p>\n Comments related to website responsiveness included:<\/p>\n \u201cAlly in general has had some downtime issues lately, or times when various parts of the site aren\u2019t working.\u201d<\/em> \u2014 Ally Invest<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes I have to slow down and let the information load in order to continue.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Edward Jones<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not fast enough.\u201d <\/em>\u2014 Robinhood<\/p>\n Respondents reported problems with difficult navigation for Ally Invest, Coinbase, E-Trade, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, and Vanguard.<\/p>\n Comments related to difficult navigation included:<\/p>\n \u201cDifficult 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).\u201d<\/em> \u2014 E-Trade<\/p>\n![\"Feature](\"https:\/\/measuringu.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/022025-scaled.png\")
<\/a>Owning stocks or having a brokerage account isn\u2019t just for the ultra-rich.<\/p>\n\n
Usability Scores<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Loyalty\/Net Promoter Scores<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nKey Drivers of UX Quality<\/strong><\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nWebsite Responsiveness<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Difficult Navigation<\/strong><\/h2>\n