Charles Schwab Integrating AI Tools and Financial Planning

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0:15 There's a lot going on when it comes to AI here at Schwab. Alison Dewar is watching all of this closely. She's head of AI at Schwab Advisor Services. It's part of the Schwab group that supports more than 17,000 registered investment advisors. They've got close to $ 6 trillion on the custody platform, and she joins us here at Schwab Impact 2026.

0:35 Welcome.

0:35 Nice to have you here. Thank you for inviting us in, all of you guys, because I feel like AI in the financial space, just over the last couple of years of coming to Impact, Wow. It has really upped in a big way. And you guys made a bunch of announcements. Talk to us a little bit about what you are doing.

0:52 There's a booth right over there, Nevis, that is relevant. Tell us how AI is penetrating your world. Yeah.

1:00 Well, first of all, thanks so much for allowing me to join you guys this afternoon. And it's apropos. Today we are calling... Today, Impact is AI Day. And we started the day with three pretty big announcements. The first one being is that our connector into Claude for Financial Advisors, a product developed by Anthropic, launched this morning. So advisors can actively enroll and set up the Schwab connector. And then they can ask natural language questions across their book of business and gain insights.

1:31 Can you explain how that's different than just me? I've played with Claude. for portfolio construction, for example, and like for budgeting and stuff, it's just fun to do to give it information and it tries to spit something out for you. How is it different than sort of the regular off-the-shelf cloud?

1:44 Yeah, so it is an important distinction. So the connector is really designed to provide authenticated access to client data for advisors. And so what that means is that as they enroll in the connector, their security teams at their firms will then permission each user. And the access to the client data is only authorized the same that it would be as if you were accessing Schwab systems very directly.

2:10 So you only see what you are permissioned to see. which is really important. The second piece is that you're now getting live access to that data. So you're not actually transporting the data yourself. It's actually just calling an API and coming in through the system directly, allowing you to give the right context and allowing you to ask deeper questions.

2:31 Why Cloud and why not go with OpenAI and ChatGPT? Yeah, I mean.

2:38 First off, Anthropic's been a great partner, has been thinking about the wealth space for quite some time. And so I think the timing was just right. And when I talked to advisors, Claude is the predominant LLM that we were hearing from advisors. That's not to say it will be the only LLM that we integrate with into the future.

2:56 But there does seem increasingly, Allison, a distinction between... open AI and anthropic when it comes to security concerns. And, you know, I'm just curious how that plays into it when you're dealing with anybody's money, right? We are concerned about what could go wrong possibly. And certainly it's a little bit heightened over the last couple of weeks because of some of the breaches. So I'm just curious how that plays into it.

3:17 Yeah, I'll leave it with this pretty simply. That's one of the reasons why the connector is built the way it is, is to ensure that we are really doing permissioned access to data over transmitting it in any other way.

3:33 So when you hear from RIAs, I mean, it's like become routine for me to say this, but the pace that things are changing.

3:40 Hmm.

3:41 It's just so remarkable. I mean, I don't think we were talking about this at Impact last year. Maybe to a different extent, but the idea of It seems like so routine that an RIA would be using an LLM in some way at this point. When you hear from the RIAs, how are they using it versus how you think they should be using them?

3:59 Yeah.

4:00 So, well, it's actually a good question. So I think about a year ago, we were looking at about a quarter of advisors who had said that they had really successfully adopted AI. And it's above 80% now. So certainly the adoption has probably outpaced kind of what we've seen in any other kind of technology advancement in previous years.

4:21 Um, what's adoption versus, you know, does that mean they're just playing around with it or versus creating an agent to do things? Cause my understanding agentic AI, um, RIAs are being very careful about that.

4:33 Yeah. And holding off. Rightfully so. Um, and so, yeah, so I think, um, what, what we're seeing is, you know, a year ago it was a lot of summarize my email, maybe draft an email.

4:43 Right.

4:44 And, And now there is definitely more exploration. And what I really like about where advisors are being thoughtful is they're thinking about the problem and our opportunity first and foremost. They're not applying AI for the sake of applying AI. And so that's one of the things that I think advisors do really well. They're keeping their clients kind of first and foremost in terms of how they're serving them, what their services they're developing. And so that's how we see them approach.

5:11 Do you get concerned at all that with the rise of this technology, the advisor won't be needed as much as in the past?

5:20 We're firmly in the camp that really says that AI will assist the advisor. If you think about the amount of administrative work that goes around kind of developing and cultivating and... your client relationships, the fact that you could kind of take so much of that administrative work really out of that process, that just allows you to lean in more personally with your clients, take a bigger role in more parts of their lives. We don't see clients reaching out for... Okay.

5:54 That's my question. Because it's like, if you can ask Claude about your portfolio construction or the right asset allocation, then... does it mean that some of the value proposition of a human being on the other end is taken away?

6:06 We hear it time and time again. Will people consult an LLM for financial advice?

6:12 Yes.

6:13 But when the decision really comes down to it, they want to talk to somebody they trust. And that's their advisor.

6:19 Sounds like I'm talking to somebody in medicine right now. It's the same thing, right? How many of us have asked one of these LLMs about, why is this thing hurting? And then gone to a doctor and gotten another answer. So I found out.

6:30 So Nevis is going to help with a lot of operational tasks and stuff. And so I'm assuming that that then frees up an advisor to actually have more one-on-ones. with their clients. I mean, that's part of it. Get rid of some of the routine stuff that can be dealt. Is that? Yeah.

6:47 So that's definitely what prompted some of our strategic partnership with Nevis is that we've been talking to them for about a year now. They are a relatively new company, but as we've watched them mature and how they approach, we're just very aligned in the value that we can both bring to advisors. And we believe about it in two ways. First is, absolutely, is Schwab going to build and provide services directly? And some of that directness is actually also one of the other announcements we did today, which is launching Esther, Wealth.com's tax and estate planning agent in SAC. Because We can now bring what's a traditionally complicated topic directly to advisors through our platform. But the second piece is really the ecosystem and the broader RIA

7:34 technology space. And Nevis just fits this role in terms of really being dedicated to taking that administrative work out of... out of the cycle.

7:44 This is happening really fast.

7:45 It's happening really fast.

7:46 This company started in 2024. That's how fast this is happening.

7:48 I'm just kind of blown away. I have to say, I think it was a couple of years ago where someone's like, we want Schwab to create an AI bot or something and look at it all.

7:58 Stay in touch.

7:59 Love to hear how things are going.

8:00 Thanks so much.

8:01 Yeah, thank you. A lot going on. Allison Dewar, she's the head of AI at Schwab Advisor Services.