Wurster, who will step into the new role on Jan. 1, 2025, mentioned that Schwab’s clients have already shown interest and actively participated in the cryptocurrency space via investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds , futures and closed-end funds, and have earned decent returns.

Now, SCHW aims to move further by directly offering cryptocurrency trading. He stated, “We’ve been waiting on a change in the regulatory environment … and we’re confident that we think that will come in short order.”

“Crypto has certainly caught many’s attention, and they’ve made a lot of money doing it,” Wurster added.

Further, Wurster shared that artificial intelligence will likely impact wealth-management business significantly. “It used to be that 60,000 times a month, we would have a phone rep spend more than three minutes searching for a piece of information to answer a client question. Now we have built an AI capability that finds that information in seconds,” he stated.

Schwab has been in the crypto space for a long time while facing competition from State Street Corp. STT and Robinhood Markets, Inc. HOOD. This August, STT entered into a strategic partnership with Taurus SA to enhance its digital solutions including crypto service. HOOD added four cryptocurrencies to its crypto platform earlier this month, bringing the total number of cryptocurrencies to 19.

Thus, by introducing crypto trading, Schwab will enter a profitable market that has seen growing demand from clients.