Schwab Targets Mid-2027 Crypto Spot Trading and Custody for the $5.2T Advisor Channel

Charles Schwab is targeting mid-2027 to bring spot crypto trading, transfers, and custody to the registered-investment-advisor channel that already houses $5.2 trillion of client money on its custody platform, Jalina Kerr, managing director at Schwab Advisor Services, told reporters at the firm's Midyear Media Roundtable last week.

The rollout is "on track for next year, probably more like the middle of the year," Kerr said, adding that Schwab has no exact date and that timing depends on product design, cash-movement rules, and custody controls. Kerr leads advisor experience and platform solutions for Schwab Advisor Services, which serves more than 16,000 RIA firms.

Schwab Advisor Services is the largest RIA custodian in the United States. The $5.2 trillion in assets it held at the end of Q1 is roughly 44% of Schwab's $11.77 trillion total client base, and grew 19% year-over-year. Once advisor crypto goes live, every RIA already plugged into Schwab's custody pipes will be able to place spot trades and custody coins inside the same reporting and fee schedule they use for stocks, bonds, and funds.

Schwab Crypto Already Exists — for Retail

The advisor plan extends the retail offer Schwab launched in April under the Schwab Crypto brand. That service gives the firm's roughly 39 million retail accounts direct spot trading in Bitcoin and Ether at 75 basis points per trade, with Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB as custodian and Paxos, an OCC-regulated trust company, providing sub-custody and execution.

Schwab disclosed in the April release that its clients already hold approximately 20% of all spot crypto exchange-traded product assets — a sign of how much crypto exposure already runs through Schwab via ETPs rather than direct coins. The mid-2027 launch would let those advisors hold the asset itself rather than a wrapper.

Schwab has not yet disclosed which assets the advisor channel will support, what the fee schedule will be, or whether Paxos will remain the sub-custody and execution partner. CEO Rick Wurster has said on prior earnings calls that stablecoin support is on the roadmap after the Bitcoin and Ether rollout.

Where Peers Already Sit

Schwab is moving into the space its closest peer has occupied for two years. Fidelity Crypto for Wealth Managers lets U.S. RIAs custodying with Fidelity Institutional view and manage client crypto on the same Wealthscape platform they use for traditional assets. Custody runs through Fidelity Digital Asset Services, a NYDFS-chartered trust company, with Fidelity Digital Assets National Association adding an OCC trust-bank charter in 2025.

For the rest of the RIA market, the dominant rails today are spot ETPs — BlackRock's IBIT, sub-custodied by Coinbase Prime, sits at the center of that flow — and specialist RIA-native platforms like Onramp Invest and Eaglebrook. Coinbase Prime held about $245 billion in institutional assets under custody as of mid-2025.

Plugging direct spot custody into a $5.2 trillion advisor book is bigger than either rail on raw scale. The eighteen-month wait is the longest "we're coming" window a US wealth-management custodian of that size has put on the table.

What's Not Locked In

Kerr framed mid-2027 as a target, not a deadline, tied to regulatory clarity, risk controls, and a buildout still in progress. Digital-asset regulation is not uniform across products, she said, so Schwab is designing the offer "from deposit to withdrawal" before committing to a hard date.

The retail rollout has been the firm's stress test for that architecture, and it slipped from a 2024 target into 2026 before launching. Wurster has spent the past three quarters publicly owning that delay — a pattern that suggests Schwab will move the advisor date again before missing it quietly.

Schwab will report on the build's progress at its next investor day. Until then, no peer of comparable scale has put a year on the calendar for direct spot crypto inside the largest RIA custody book in the country.