Schwab CEO Remains Cautious on Crypto

Cryptocurrency is “certainly hard to ignore,” but Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger remains cautious about offering direct trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies until lingering issues are resolved, he said Tuesday at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s annual conference, held virtually.

“It’s become large enough and consumer awareness is high enough that you can’t ignore it,” Bettinger said of crypto. But, “from a corporate standpoint, we don’t really take a viewpoint on whether it’s right for investors …. Personally, I really have no opinion on Bitcoin as an investment any more than I do artwork or the explosion in values of baseball cards of late,” he added.

He predicted there will be “more and more ways to invest in crypto — maybe ways that are a bit safer than direct purchases.”

However, for now anyway, “when you look at it from a regulatory standpoint, it seems pretty clear that there’s a certain group of organizations that are not headed toward direct trading at this point and, generally speaking, they’re under a common regulator with the Federal Reserve,” he pointed out.

On the other hand, “some of the organizations that are under a different regulatory regime seem to be stepping out a bit more on the direct trading side,” he noted.

When it comes to the “complications around cryptocurrency, I think we look at it more from a bigger picture standpoint,” he went on to say.

For one thing, he explained, it is still not clear exactly how the U.S. government intends to regulate crypto. That is concerning, “particularly given the anonymity that is possible through crypto investing and the conversion of cash to stablecoins in an offshore, less-than-transparent manner” that can be used to “trade anonymously within” digital wallets, he said.

We are dealing with “really complex issues that rise to a level beyond, I think, the way a firm like Schwab or other financial services companies try to serve investors,” according to Bettinger.

“At the same time, I can see great difficulty for our government striving to regulate crypto” because of the “fundamental way that [crypto] operates, no matter what regulators might prefer to do or say,” he said.

Meanwhile, “I do think it’s important for us to be able to know sources of money, what money belongs to which people just for society overall,” he said, explaining: “There are tremendous benefits in that in ensuring a well-functioning society where crime and taking advantage of certain people … is diminished.”

And all of that “has to be worked out and resolved, in my view, before crypto can really go completely mainstream,” he said.