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This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
It isn’t just media companies struggling for the attention of young people.
Consumer brands from across the economy are trying to figure out the sensibilities of Gen Z and eventually claim them as their own. Financial services firms are no different.
Robinhood (HOOD) and Coinbase (COIN) have rapidly expanded the products they offer, growing from stock and crypto trading platforms and inching closer to becoming bank replacements.
Legacy firms, eager for capital and growth, have adopted some of their signature innovations — from slick, frictionless apps to no-fee trading, and a big, red “OPEN” sign for crypto products.
Charles Schwab (SCHW), which reported earnings this week, is a new case study in successfully attracting young people.
The brokerage firm managed to yank the average age of its customers down by 10 years, to people in their 40s.
That’s no small feat for a company whose ad campaign once leaned on the catchphrase “Talk to Chuck.” Then, like now, the firm is banking on approachability. Gen Zers probably aren’t talking to Chuck on the phone. But they’re talking. And Schwab has been listening.
“This year, nearly one-third of new-to-firm retail households at Schwab are Gen Zers, investors between the ages of 13 and 28,” said chief executive Rick Wurster during the company’s earnings call this week.
Wurster said part of Schwab’s progress in winning the business of millennials and Gen Z is meeting them where they are. Because we’re all always on our screens, Schwab has made its YouTube presence a priority.
“We know they learn about finances primarily through social media and family. Their top online resource is YouTube, and we’re the No. 1 financial services firm on YouTube by followers,” said Wurster.
Schwab has more than half a million subscribers on YouTube, compared to Coinbase’s 122,000 and Robinhood’s 66,000.
The company has also expanded the asset classes its clients can trade and is promising to soon bring spot trading for bitcoin. If the digital platforms started from the trading fringes and are working their way to core banking, Schwab is doing the inverse, tapping into that trading energy.
But it’s also offering a suite of traditional banking services and financial planning.
Investing has no doubt gained elevated cultural importance for a number of reasons. For young people especially, the idea of compounding money and building wealth represents a kind of freedom from the economic calamities they have been witness to and from the drudgery of a lifetime of work. They’ve also seen a lot of people make a lot of money over the last decade.
