Rick Wurster, the incoming chief executive of banking and investment giant Charles Schwab, said the company plans to offer spot crypto trading once regulations in the United States make it easier.
He also admitted to feeling silly that he has yet to purchase any digital assets. “Crypto has certainly caught many’s attention, and they’ve made a lot of money doing it,” he said in an interview on Bloomberg Radio on Nov. 21, before adding:
“I have not bought crypto, and now I feel silly.”
He added that he was not planning on investing in crypto at the moment but wanted to support Schwab clients who wish to do so, adding that the firm is anticipating positive changes to the regulatory environment in the United States.
“We’d also like to directly offer crypto … We’ve been waiting for a change in the regulatory environment in order to do that, and we’re confident that we think that will come in short order,” he told Yahoo Finance.
He said the bank’s clients have already been very active in the crypto space, investing through vehicles that the firm currently offers, such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and futures, which have performed well.
Schwab faces competition from traditional firms such as Fidelity and newer trading platforms like Robinhood and Webull.
Wurster was also bullish on artificial intelligence technologies, which are likely to substantially impact the wealth-management business.
“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 told Bloomberg.
Wurster will become CEO on Jan. 1, replacing Walt Bettinger, who has led Schwab since 2008.
In October, Charles Schwab published the results of a survey revealing that crypto outranked fixed-income as the second most sought-after asset class among ETF investors.
Crypto market capitalization has been propelled to an all-time high of $3.45 trillion on Nov. 22, boosted by the announcement of US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Genlser’s planned departure from the agency in January.