Charles Schwab Invests in AI Start-Up Nevis as Advisor Tech Race Intensifies

Key Points

Charles Schwab is investing in Nevis, an artificial-intelligence startup that serves wealth management firms.
Charles Schwab will collaborate with Nevis on technology integrations designed to reduce manual work for financial advisors.
The investment comes as shareholders focus on whether artificial intelligence will boost business at brokerage firms or siphon it away.

BOSTON— Charles Schwab is expanding artificial-intelligence capabilities for financial advisors and making an investment in Nevis, an AI start-up that specializes in serving wealth management firms.

Charles Schwab Photo: Trong Nguyen / Dreamstime

The announcement, made at Schwab Impact, the company’s annual conference for advisors, comes as analysts and shareholders focus on whether AI will boost business at brokerage firms or siphon it away.

Schwab has been expanding its use of AI internally and making efforts to provide more AI capabilities to its customers, both individual investors and advisors. Schwab, which didn’t disclose details of the Nevis investment, is the largest custodian for registered investment advisors, serving more than 17,000 RIAs. The Westlake, Texas-based company hopes to cement its relationship with RIAs by providing a suite of AI capabilities that advisors can pick and choose from.

“There won’t be just one AI tool that runs every advisory firm,” Jon Beatty, head of Schwab Advisor Services, says. Schwab’s job is to build an AI ecosystem that supports advisors and enables them to decide what works best for their practices and clients, he adds.

Nevis was founded in 2024 by former executives at Revolut, a London-based digital financial services company. Schwab says that in addition to its investment in Nevis, it will collaborate with the start-up on Schwab-specific technology integrations that will cut down on advisors’ manual work.

That and other AI integrations are critical to making the technology effective for advisors, says Alison Dooher, head of AI for Schwab Advisor Services. “The key is all the integrations become more powerful when they work with trusted data and operating context,” she says. “As the custodian, we are in a great position to help with that. It makes any agentic experience more powerful.”

Nevis’ other investors include Sequoia Capital, EQT Ventures, and QuantumLight. Nevis says its AI-powered platform can help advisors with tasks such as meeting preparation and onboarding new clients. “Our agents handle complex workflows from start to finish, so every advisor can stop worrying about handoffs and rekeying and focus on giving every client the white-glove attention they deserve,” Mark Swan, CEO and co-founder of Nevis, says in a statement.

Nevis isn’t Schwab’s first AI investment. The company also took a stake in Wealth.com, an AI-powered trust- and estate-planning service, in 2025. Schwab says it is introducing Ester, a new tax- and estate-planning tool from Wealth.com. An introductory version is available free until February 2027; Schwab intends to introduce a paid version in the first quarter of 2027, which will allow advisors to connect Ester to authorized Schwab data.

The moves build on other Schwab AI announcements. In September, the company unveiled Charley, an AI chatbot that can field individual investors’ questions and perform limited actions on their behalf. In addition, Schwab said that Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Advisors, a suite of AI tools that the two companies unveiled in September, is now live inside the Schwab Advisor Center.

Over the past year, investors have fretted over perceived AI threats to brokerage and bank stocks. The most recent example came just last month when Facebook owner Meta launched Muse, a personal AI assistant that can take actions on behalf of users. Investors sold financial stocks on worries that Muse or similar AI agents may one day help investors optimize their cash holdings by automatically moving idle dollars out of low-paying bank and brokerage accounts to higher-paying options elsewhere. That would pressure earnings at bank and brokerage firms that rely on low-cost deposits.

Write to Andrew Welsch at andrew.welsch@barrons.com

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