An older Schwab client talks to ChatGPT all day. She calls it her best friend and even wishes it good night. But a big money decision gets a phone call to her Schwab adviser. Rick Wurster, the CEO of Charles Schwab (SCHW), met her recently and told her story to the Journal's Hannah Erin Lang. To him, her habit shows where financial advice is headed.
Wurster's view is that most people will want both. Technology for the research and the chores, a person for the decisions that matter. That's a calmer take than Wall Street's. A few weeks ago Meta Platforms (META) launched an AI agent called Muse. It set off worries that bots might soon move money, draft tax strategies or sweep idle cash into higher-yielding accounts. Schwab stock dropped more than 6% in the selloff that followed. Raymond James and LPL Financial took similar hits.
Why he isn't worried
Wurster calls a big AI-driven cash shift very unlikely. For one thing, Schwab blocks outside agents from logging in to customer accounts. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon said last week his bank does the same. Wurster also doubts there's much idle cash sitting around that people have forgotten about. Schwab is building its own tools. Its new assistant, Charley, can look up a quote or a balance and do other simple jobs. A small group of traders can now link an outside AI model to their accounts, with a wider rollout planned in the coming months. He's keeping one limit. Agents won't be fully on their own. They'll act only on rules the client sets.
The sharper words were for the smaller brokerages pitching agentic trading, a team of AI agents playing the market while you sleep. “There's no magic recipe to outperform the market,” Wurster said. He noted that many firms pushing it depend largely on trade volume for their profits. Some of the same firms sell yes-or-no bets on sports and pop culture as investing. Wurster called them firms that describe gambling as an asset class, and said to look at who gets paid. Schwab, for its part, reported record core net new assets of more than $190 billion for the third quarter on Thursday, Oct. 15, up 38% from a year earlier. Its shares closed at $89.58 on Monday, Oct. 19, down $2.38.
Our read
Insurance/Consumer Protection · M11, with a Behavioral note. We don't own Charles Schwab (SCHW) shares in our model books, though some books use Schwab-run funds. Meta is held at weight in 20 books and JPMorgan in 26; nothing added. We don't have a stake in who wins the AI race in brokerage. We do have a stake in the client's habit in the story. Use the bot for homework. Keep a human, and a written set of rules, for the big calls. And ask Wurster's question of any app you use. If it earns more the more you trade or bet, its goals aren't yours.
Here's the check for this week. Open your brokerage app and find the security settings, then the list of connected apps and logins. If an AI tool or any third party can see or move your money, decide on purpose whether it should. Then write down the three decisions you'll never hand to software, like a rollover, a Roth conversion or a sale of more than 10% of an account. That's the line Wurster's client draws. The bot gets the small talk, and a person gets the big calls. If you'd like a second opinion on your list, bring it to your next review.