This year at Future Proof Citywide we wanted to bring out the one person everyone in wealth management needs to hear from right now. That person is Rick Wurster, Chief Executive Officer of the Charles Schwab Corporation. Schwab has been absolutely on fire over the last year, adding tens of millions of new retail accounts - a third of which are coming from the Gen Z segment. In the popular imagination, Schwab is not competing for this younger client. The popular imagination is just flat-out wrong. Of the 46 million new brokerage accounts opened there in 2025, approximately one third are from Gen Z households.

We had a wide-ranging and candid conversation about some of the things advisors care most about. We touched on the decision Schwab made to raise the minimum account size for the advisor referral network from $500,000 to $2 million. I asked Rick how advisors utilizing Schwab as a custodian should feel about the brokerage giant competing with its own internal wealth solution and going direct to consumer. His answer was a good one and I saw lots of nodding from the massive crowd who watched the live recording.

We asked Rick about prediction markets and other speculative activity that has been gaining in popularity. He drew an important distinction between the value of prediction market information versus the betting activity itself.

We talked through how Schwab sees the current competitive landscape, with Robinhood entering the custody space at the low end and Goldman Sachs getting more aggressive at the high end. Rick’s willingness to engage on this topic and be very specific surprised some people in the audience.

With $12 trillion in assets under management and one of the largest customer bases in all of financial services, Schwab is in a position of significant influence over what the next ten years on Wall Street are going to look like and which innovations will actually take hold. Rick’s AI takes are vital given how much of this technological revolution will directly meet the consumer on his platform.

My media team went above and beyond to make the YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcast versions bring you into the event and make you feel like you’re sitting there on the beach with us. This is one of the most extraordinary episodes we’ve ever produced. I hope you love it. You can watch or listen to the show on the platform of your choice at the links below!

THE COMPOUND & FRIENDS

Josh and Michael are joined by Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster to discuss: the future of finance, AI's impact, being the $12 Trillion king of brokerages, and much more!