Charles Schwab is finally letting its customers buy and sell crypto in-house. The brokerage giant on Thursday unveiled “Schwab Crypto,” a service debuting in the coming weeks to let clients trade bitcoin and ethereum directly within their accounts, reports Quartz. Each trade will carry a 0.75% fee—costlier than Robinhood’s zero-commission crypto offering, but cheaper than the upper end of Coinbase’s fee, at 4%. Paxos will safeguard the digital coins in accounts kept separate from clients’ regular brokerage assets.
CEO Rick Wurster previously said that many Schwab customers park nearly all of their money with the firm but hold a sliver of crypto at specialist platforms, and that they want those holdings all pulled under one roof they “trust.” The move drops Schwab into an increasingly crowded lane: Robinhood already melds stock and crypto trading, while cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Kraken are pushing into equities.
It’s part of a broader Wall Street tilt toward digital assets, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley rolling out bitcoin-linked products and Fidelity offering no-fee crypto trades. Schwab shares slipped 5% on Thursday amid the news and weaker-than-expected first-quarter revenue. Also coming down the pike for Schwab, following the trend of other financial companies, per the Wall Street Journal: AI tools for investors, which will debut in the coming months.
