Financial services giant Charles Schwab has plans to directly offer crypto investments to its clients, president and incoming CEO Rick Wurster told Yahoo Finance in an interview on Thursday.
Wurster, who will step into the new role on Jan. 1, said that clients of the bank have already been very active in the crypto space through vehicles like exchange-traded funds (ETFs), futures and closed-end funds, and have done well with those.
But the bank wants to take it a step further.
“We also would like to directly offer crypto,” he said. “We’ve been waiting on a change in the regulatory environment … and we’re confident that we think that will come in short order.”
In 2021, the bank said that when it decides to participate in the crypto market, it would be “highly competitive” and "disruptive.”
While it has so far taken a backseat in the adoption of crypto, it hasn’t been hostile towards the industry, either. Unlike Vanguard, for example, Schwab never blocked its clients from trading spot bitcoin ETFs after they hit the market at the beginning of this year.
The bank was also one of the main investors in crypto exchange EDX Markets which was launched in 2022 by a former senior executive at trading giant Citadel Securities.
In March of the same year, it also launched the Schwab Crypto Thematic Index (STCE), an ETF that tracks the performance of companies that could benefit from the development or utilization of cryptocurrencies.