How can Regions Bank change beneficiary names on IRAs?
Brenda, I’m not aware of the particular individual (or case?) of which you’re speaking, but this has been an issue with a few IRA custodians recently, notably including Vanguard. In the Vanguard case, the company adopted a policy that all retirement accounts of a similar type needed to have the same IRA beneficiaries, and Vanguard “updated” the beneficiaries designations for many customers with multiple IRA accounts so that all the account had the beneficiary designation of whatever the most recent beneficiaries were for any of the accounts. Vanguard did sent notifications to account holders about these changes, although arguably some people may not have read or understood the notification and still found their beneficiary designations “unexpectedly” changed. Perhaps this is similar to what may have happened in the situations of which you are speaking? In any event, it does appear under the law that IRA custodians have some flexibility in restricting or setting beneficiary designations
