Schwab Advisor Services adds $120.1 billion in Q3 net new assets

Schwab Advisor Services took in $120.1 billion in net new assets in the third quarter, up 47% from a year earlier. Advisor assets reached $5.85 trillion at the end of September, up 17% year over year and nearly 44% of the $13.33 trillion Schwab reported across the firm.

The advisor unit brought in more new money than Schwab's retail arm, Investor Services, which added $72.3 billion. The figures were released Thursday, InvestmentNews reported, alongside record firmwide quarterly revenue of $7.2 billion, up 17% year over year.

Of the $187.9 billion in client margin loans outstanding at the end of September, $60.7 billion was tied to long-short strategies used by RIAs. Average margin loans linked to those strategies ran $51.4 billion in the quarter, more than 18 times the $2.8 billion average a year earlier, and Schwab cited the strategies as one reason net interest revenue rose 14%.

Schwab has been slowing the program down. Earlier this year it introduced limits on the portion of an RIA's assets that could be allocated to long-short accounts, and last month it raised the minimum for tax-aware long-short accounts to $10 million from $1 million. CEO Rick Wurster told analysts on the earnings call that the program grew faster than Schwab expected because a large competitor had less capacity to support it. "It was important to us to throttle growth for a period of time to make sure that we can support this from an operational standpoint, from a capacity standpoint," he said. Since the mid-September change, he added, Schwab has not seen any signs of deceleration in Advisor Services net new assets.

Schwab's breakdown of the quarter's new business put firms with more than $5 billion on its platform at 36% of institutional Advisor Services net new assets. The $1 billion-to-$5 billion cohort contributed 22%, practices with $100 million to $1 billion supplied 30%, and those under $100 million made up 13%. The two smallest bands accounted for 43% between them, more than the largest cohort.

Wurster said Schwab serves more than 16,000 RIAs and that 1,101 advisory firms added it as a custodian in 2025, a count he said is verified in Form ADV filings. Its next four competitors added between 79 and 349 firms each, according to Schwab.