Schwab tells RIAs its wealth arm isn’t 'competing for new business' - InvestmentNews
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Schwab tells RIAs its wealth arm isn’t 'competing for new business'
Schwab CEO Rick Wurster
At IMPACT, CEO Rick Wurster said Schwab Wealth Advisory serves only existing retail clients, and he pledged support for sub-$100M RIAs as Fidelity drops them.
October 29, 2026
By Andrew Cohen
Schwab’s fast-growing in-house wealth advisory business isn’t competing with RIAs for clients, CEO Rick Wurster said at the custodian’s IMPACT conference in Boston.
The Schwab Wealth Advisory (SWA) business started with four offices and has grown to around 25 across the U.S., serving Schwab retail investors who may want to pay for advice from its internal team. On stage at IMPACT, Wurster was asked “how do you reconcile” expanding SWA’s footprint while maintaining that Schwab isn’t competing with RIAs for clients.
Existing clients only, Schwab says
“The folks in those [SWA] offices are not going out into the local community and competing for new business,” Wurster said. “They are working with our existing Schwab clients that we have built relationships with over years, decades, and for whom likely their financial complexity and wealth has changed while they’ve been a client of Schwab.”
Net flows into Schwab Wealth Advisory rose 55%, the brokerage said in its third-quarter earnings report on October 15. Schwab also has more than 400 branches serving retail investors, which Wurster said hold $7 trillion in assets across about 30 million accounts.
“Those wealth advisors in those local communities do not go out into the local market looking for new wealth business,” Wurster said. “When [retail investors] want advice, we want to be able to serve them. We have two ways of serving them through our Schwab Advisors...”