Charles Schwab has finished the multi-year repair of its bank funding stack and is now trying to turn a custody franchise into a higher-return wealth and lending platform. The June quarter is the first clean print of that shift. Forge Global sits inside the numbers for a full period, spot crypto trading is live in a phased retail rollout, and pledged-asset lending is compounding from a still-tiny client base. Record net revenue of $7.1 billion is the scoreboard. The investment debate is whether that mix can keep expanding after trading activity cools from a record daily pace.
The engine underneath the print is no longer emergency deposit repair. Net interest margin crossed three percent, helped by pledged-asset and margin balances that carry a spread over securities rather than by another rate shock. Transactional sweep cash rebuilt by $24.2 billion sequentially. The ending sweep balance was $485.7 billion. That rebuild undercuts the cash-sorting narrative that defined the rate-shock years. Asset-management fees and trading revenue both grew double digits, so the firm is no longer a one-factor rate story. The counterargument is that daily average trades of 11.9 million embed a market-beta that management already haircuts in the full-year scenario.
Core net new assets of $119.8 billion arrived with 1.4 million new brokerage accounts, which is gathering, not just mark-to-market. Management lifted the full-year revenue-growth scenario to a band of 17.5% to 18.5%. Expense growth is also higher because volume and Forge add cost on top of the underlying mid-single-digit run rate. August core gathering of $64.8 billion, an August record, argues the organic story survived the summer. The open question is whether advice and lending penetration can replace trading heat as the daily-average-trade assumption steps down to 10.6 million for the year.