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April 22, 2021 at 03:12 PM
What You Need to Know
- Schwab says the extra costs are due to changes in trading volume and its work toward improving the client experience.
- The firm now expects to complete the integration at the high end of its forecast, within 30 to 36 months.
- It also said it would wait for more regulatory clarity before offering any crypto products.
Charles Schwab expects the integration of TD Ameritrade into its business to cost about $400 million to $600 million more than originally expected, at $2 billion to $2.2 billion, Joe Martinetto, Schwab senior executive vice president and chief operating officer, said Thursday during a spring business update.
Meanwhile, the firm says it’s open to offering cryptocurrency products but is waiting for more clarity on the regulatory front.
Schwab now expects the TD Ameritrade integration to cost more than the $1.6 billion originally expected due to the “increase in scope” that is planned, according to Martinetto.
“Roughly half the increase” now expected in the integration budget has been “driven by the volume changes alone” in trading over the past few months, he explained. “The remainder is the additional work” that has been done to “provide a superior client experience and mitigate some of the future risk to our service platform,” he said.
Since Schwab first announced its planned acquisition of TD Ameritrade in November 2019, it has seen tremendous growth in client volumes, company executives said Thursday. While active brokerage accounts are up by 25%, daily average trades and peak daily trades have quadrupled, according to the company.
“While our original deal model assumed we would need capacity at integration for 12 million trades, we exceeded that level in Q1, with a daily high of 12.3 million trades,” a Schwab spokeswoman said.
“To address these new dynamics, we have expanded the scope of our integration plans, with a focus on three areas,” she explained to ThinkAdvisor. They are: “Ensuring the scalability and resiliency of our tech infrastructure, including taking steps to manage spikes in trading volume on a single platform; introducing new features and capabilities to ensure the smoothest possible experiences for new clients; and automating certain operations in order to handle increased volumes without creating large backlogs.”
Schwab also now projects the completion of the integration will be at the “long end of our initial time frame and we now expect to complete conversion within 30 to 36 months” as a result of the increased scope of the project, Martinetto said.
The integration was initially projected by Schwab and TD Ameritrade to take 18 to 36 months. Industry experts had told ThinkAdvisor they expected the full integration to come in at the higher end of that projection.
