Rick Wurster, set to become CEO next year, stated he has no plans to buy crypto but aims to support Charles Schwab clients who do.
Rick Wurster, the future CEO of the massive banking and investing firm Charles Schwab, stated that the company intends to offer spot cryptocurrency trading as soon as US authorities permit it.
He also acknowledged that he felt foolish about not having bought any digital assets yet.
In an interview on Bloomberg Radio on November 21, he stated, “Crypto has caught many’s attention, and they’ve made much money doing it.” He continued,
“I have not bought crypto, and now I feel silly.”
He went on to say that while he did not currently have any plans to invest in cryptocurrency, he wanted to help Schwab clients who did and that the company is looking forward to favorable changes to the US regulatory landscape.
Additionally, we would like to offer cryptocurrency directly. To achieve that, we have been awaiting a shift in the regulatory landscape, and we are certain that this will happen soon,” he told Yahoo Finance.
According to him, the bank’s customers have already been heavily involved in the cryptocurrency market, investing through products the company presently sells, like futures and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have done well.
Newer trading platforms like Robinhood and Webull, as well as more established companies like Fidelity, compete with Charles Schwab.
Wurster was particularly optimistic about AI technologies, which are expected to have a significant impact on the wealth management industry.
In the past, 60,000 times a month, a phone representative would take longer than three minutes to find the information they needed to respond to a client’s query.
We’ve now developed an AI system that can locate that data in a matter of seconds,” he told Bloomberg.
On January 1, Wurster will take over as CEO, succeeding Walt Bettinger, who has been in charge of Charles Schwab since 2008.
Crypto surpassed fixed-income as the second most desired asset class among ETF investors, according to a poll released by Charles Schwab in October.
With the news that US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Genlser will be leaving the agency in January, the cryptocurrency market capitalization surged to an all-time high of $3.45 trillion on November 22.