Community Trust ScoreVerified
Charles Schwab is coming for the crypto custody business. The firm plans to roll out spot crypto trading, transfers, and full custody for financial advisors by mid-2027 — a move that puts it on a direct collision course with the specialized players that currently dominate that corner of the market.
Right now, advisors who want to manage client crypto positions have to go outside their main platforms. They’re routing assets through Coinbase Prime, BitGo, Anchorage, and others. It’s a fragmented setup — separate reporting, separate compliance workflows, separate logins. Schwab’s pitch is basically: stop doing that. The new advisor product would let RIAs trade, transfer, and store digital assets on the same platform where they already manage equities, bonds, and funds. One dashboard. One compliance stack. The firm already launched retail crypto trading earlier in 2026, using Paxos for sub-custody and execution, so the infrastructure groundwork is at least partly in place.
Coinbase Prime manages around $330 billion in institutional assets.
That number is big. But Schwab sits on roughly $5 trillion in RIA custody assets — a figure Nate Geraci, President of The ETF Store, flagged when he weighed in on the announcement. His read: Schwab’s move into direct crypto trading for advisors is significant, precisely because of that scale. Even a modest shift of RIA allocations from third-party crypto custodians onto Schwab’s platform would translate into billions moving out of Coinbase Prime’s column.
Fidelity Already There, Schwab Close Behind
Schwab isn’t the first big traditional name to go after this market. Fidelity Digital Assets has been offering institutional custody and trade execution to advisors, family offices, and hedge funds for a while now. Schwab’s entry doesn’t exactly shock anyone who’s watched this space. But it does sharpen the competitive pressure on crypto-native firms that built their institutional businesses on the assumption that big wirehouses and custodians would stay on the sidelines.
They’re not staying on the sidelines.
Jalina Kerr, managing director at Schwab Advisor Services, put it plainly: advisors keep running into clients who hold digital assets outside their managed accounts and want to pull everything into one regulated wealth platform. That demand is real and it’s been building. Clients who bought Bitcoin or Ether on their own — through Coinbase’s retail app, through an exchange, wherever — are now asking their advisors to manage it alongside everything else. Advisors can’t do that cleanly when the crypto sits in a separate silo with its own reporting. Schwab is betting that solving that problem is worth building the whole infrastructure.
The mid-2027 timeline isn’t arbitrary. Schwab says it’s accounting for custody architecture development, federal regulatory compliance, and trading infrastructure build-out. That’s a lot of moving parts, and it’s probably the honest answer for why this takes another year-plus to get live. Digital asset custody at the institutional level has compliance requirements that aren’t trivial — cold storage standards, key management, proof of reserves, the whole stack. Schwab’s bank-and-broker structure gives it some advantages in navigating that, but it’s still real work.
Pressure Builds on Smaller Custodians
For the crypto-native custody firms, the math gets uncomfortable fast. Coinbase Prime, BitGo, Anchorage — they built their advisor-facing businesses on being the specialists. Better onboarding for digital assets, deeper integrations with crypto-specific tools, faster execution on less liquid tokens. That’s where they’ve competed. But Schwab’s advantage is the bundle. If an RIA can get custody, trading, compliance reporting, and client portal access all in one place — and that place already manages the rest of the client’s portfolio — the crypto-native custodian has to offer something meaningfully better to keep the business.
Pricing is probably where the fight gets real. Schwab can afford to compress margins on crypto custody if it keeps the broader advisory relationship. Smaller specialists can’t subsidize that way.
No statement from Coinbase or the other affected firms as of publication. Unclear whether they’re watching and waiting or already reworking their advisor value propositions behind the scenes.
The retail rollout earlier in 2026 started with Bitcoin and Ether. The advisor product is expected to cover similar assets at launch — no word yet on whether the scope expands beyond that before mid-2027.
Schwab’s custody arm holds $5 trillion. Mid-2027 is the target date.
Frequently Asked Questions
When will Schwab launch crypto services for financial advisors?
Schwab is targeting mid-2027 for the rollout of spot crypto trading, transfers, and custody services specifically built for registered investment advisors.
Which crypto custodians could lose business to Schwab?
Coinbase Prime, which manages roughly $330 billion in institutional assets, is among the most directly exposed, along with other specialized custodians like BitGo and Anchorage that currently serve the RIA market.
