Anthropic's Claude needs 20 seats, a mismatch for 11,000 Schwab RIAs

Anthropic's Claude for Financial Advisors carries a 20-seat minimum and a $4,800 annual price, a combination that fits awkwardly with the 11,000 Schwab Advisor Services firms managing less than $100 million. Citywire first reported the minimum, and RIABiz reported the annual price and that Anthropic go-to-market executive Drew Parker made the minimum explicit on a Claude webinar for RIAs.

Schwab announced the arrangement on Sept. 14, saying it became the exclusive RIA custodian for the Claude software. Its materials put the audience at 16,000 advisory firms. A practice with one or two advisors has no use for 17 or 18 extra seats.

For a five-advisor firm, the 20-seat minimum requires buying 15 more seats than it can use. RIABiz did not specify whether the $4,800 is per seat or per contract; at the 20-seat minimum the two readings are $96,000 and $4,800 a year.

A five-advisor firm paying per seat pays four times the list price for the seats it actually uses.

This publication argued in September that the exclusive bought Schwab a queue position rather than a better model.

Parker said he is working to see if the enterprise seat count can be lowered. "For the time being, there is no path to that," he said, according to RIABiz. Whether Schwab will offset the gap for smaller firms is the open term going into IMPACT.