investors business daily's annual roundup of the best online brokers is now available and
joining me today to talk about charles schwab is barry metzger he's the senior
vice president of trading services at schwab so barry when we take a look at last year it
was an extraordinary year but can you talk a little bit about the account growth that schwab
saw and what the company is doing to focus on attracting and helping new investors
yeah absolutely alex is happy to be here um thank you for having me
so um you know 2020 was an amazing year in terms of growth and we're seeing high levels
of investor engagement and growth um really across all age groups which has been
phenomenal to see just a ton of interest in investing a ton of interest in doing it yourself
um which is great to see but actually um with younger investors this isn't just a
2020 phenomenon it's been something that's been going on for quite a while actually getting back
to early 2019 more than 50 percent of the new accounts that have been opened up at schwab have
been uh householders under the age of 40 which is an awesome trend to see right um just more people
who want to get involved investing so really from our perspective to get you know investors
started on the right foot especially new investors it's really important to provide new clients with
everything that they need to be successful so that's a combination of research and education
and tools and service just so clients have the confidence that they need to get started and
really enjoy their investing experience so in 2020 we've seen upwards of a hundred thousand clients
per month access our client learning center which provides extensive educational articles
and trading courses for really every type of investor and you've talked about the educational
component but i really feel like schwab on the product side has been so innovative i mean you
were one of the first to really implement zero fee trading that's become a standard in the industry
now so what other innovations are you looking at on the product side to keep customers engaged
yeah well as always um it always starts with a client and we're going to continue to listen to
clients and innovate to meet their needs so as you said alexis zero commissions was certainly
a big one and and certainly got a lot of clients attention which is great to see because it just
goes to a no trade-offs philosophy that we've had for a long time and that's to provide world-class
service education and a platform to trade without any trade-offs just because we're going to zero
commissions so in that same spirit what we saw last year was i'll highlight three new products
that we rolled out which have garnered a lot of interest and proved to be early success schwab
stock slices say that three times quickly schwab stock slices which allows clients to purchase the
fractional shares of any stock on the s p 500 for as little as five dollars with zero online trading
commissions so think about this you know back on the theme that we were talking about before
new investors entering into the market what better way to do that than with fractional shares and an
easy way to engage into the financial market so instead of spending thousands of dollars to buy
one share of amazon you now for five dollars can literally own a piece of amazon through fractional
shares and through schwab stock slices so um it's really an important way to get clients to start
introducing them to the market which is very important uh two other products that we rolled
out last year the schwa plan and schwa plan is really important it's a free self-guided
digital financial plan designed to help investors establish and stay on track toward their personal
financial goals and schwa plan is available to all schwa clients and then the last item
that we rolled out last year was schwab intelligent income and this is something i'm
personally very excited about and something we've been wanting to do for a long time at schwa but
this is an income solution designed for people who want a simple modern way to pay themselves
in retirement or any other time from their investment portfolio so this just gets to the old
added story of look it's really really important to save and add access to your account but at some
point you're going to start using them and you need to be able to budget yourself and
understand what your needs are relative to your income needs and be able to plan for that and
track that so between schwab stock slices schwab plan and schwab intelligent income
we really launched a great suite of products for our clients based on their needs
yeah you know on the product side because i feel like the technology aspect has been
so important just in the in the dna of schwab and you know i look at partnerships that you have with
names like google and just really integrating some of this tech like artificial intelligence
how important are those partnerships in the strategic and moving forward and
what other types of technologies are you looking to integrate
yeah they're they're incredibly important because um we know you know as this industry
continues to move forward personalization and customization are going to be incredibly important
right clients want um you know to know that we're getting to know them well and their needs and we
can anticipate their needs so um a couple things uh in regards to just you know other people that
we're partnering on i think you know but in june of 2020 we closed on our acquisition of motif
and motifs technology capabilities and motif is a fintech pioneer really that has combined
breakthrough technology and cutting-edge data science to deliver customized thematic portfolios
to investors so this is thematic investing i mean this is literally something that is so critical
and make things so simple for our clients to figure out ways that they wanted to invest not
based on a chart or not by looking at analytics but but looking at themes that are important to
them so we intend to leverage motifs platform to build on schwab's existing capabilities and help
accelerate our development of thematic and direct indexing solutions for schwab's retail investors
and riaa clients and with all the sophisticated digital experience our clients expect from schwab
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