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Inside Schwab’s Vision for Advisor Tech

Discover how Schwab is empowering advisors to combine digital innovation with the personal connections that define great advice.

Shannon Rosic, Director of WealthStack Content and Solutions, Informa Connect

December 10, 2025

As technology reshapes the advisor experience, Schwab is focused on helping firms modernize without losing the human touch. 

Alison Dooher of Schwab joins Shannon Rosic to discuss how innovations like AI, data unification and hybrid tech stacks are creating more efficient, personalized, and scalable advisory practices.

Read the full raw transcript below:

Shannon Rosic: How is Schwab helping advisors harness innovation while still keeping that human element front and center? To learn more, I'm joined by Alison Dooher of Schwab. Alison, thanks so much for joining me.

Alison Dooher: Thanks so much for having me.

Shannon Rosic: So I always love getting to talk tech with you and getting to hear about what you're working on at Schwab. So let's start with innovations. How are innovations like automated trading and digital onboarding, unified data views, especially, helping advisors deliver more personalized and efficient advice?

Alison Dooher: Yeah, I think about it kind of as data. Data is the core layer, and what we've been doing over the past several years, both operationally and how we display it to advisors, does a couple of things. One, it allows you to take some operational friction out of your client engagements, and therefore you actually get to focus more on the engagement aspect and less on the transactional nature of it.

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The second is teeing up data in a smart, consolidated, relevant way. This also allows advisors to really think about what they want to talk about with their clients and really focus on those important points. Both of those areas have been a focus, and we've seen some good advancements over the past couple of years.

Shannon Rosic: You actually have a recent study that's out that I want to dig into a little bit. It said that firms are adopting hybrid tech stacks. Why do you think this hybrid approach is resonating so strongly with advisors, and how is Schwab supporting that flexibility?

Alison Dooher: We've seen a really interesting evolution of fintech platforms and fintech platform strategy among advisors. If you think about 10 or 15 years ago, it was your custodial tech stack, right? That was kind of the option. Now, we're joined here at Impact with well over 50 different vendors just in our tech alley alone.

If you walk through the exhibit hall, fintech is alive and well in the RIA industry. Because of that breadth of choice, we actually saw a proliferation at some point of a best-in-breed approach. You would have point solutions for different parts of your practices.

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What advisors have found today, and what is pushing them more toward a hybrid approach, is that they’d like to find something centralized that manages the core pieces of their business and maybe round it out with some specialties. By centralizing, you're actually simplifying. You’re not necessarily creating the value you might have seen in a best-of-breed approach, but what you are getting is a lot of time back and efficiency.

Shannon Rosic: So then how is Schwab ultimately ensuring that advisors have both that stability and innovation? How do you help them strike that balance?

Alison Dooher: We think we have to do the core things really well. We refer to it as "brilliant basics" internally. Beyond that, that's where you really earn your right to provide deeper and more valuable services for advisors.

What you'll see from us in the coming years is continuing to close the gap on operational efficiencies. There's a long tail, and we are going to chase that tail. The second piece is how we bring things together a little more seamlessly and start marrying wealth and custody a little closer.

We have a robust toolset in-house, and we’ll make that a little more interoperable. Additionally, we’re really going to focus on our external integrations with partners.

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Shannon Rosic: And because we're talking tech, you know we have to talk about it. You know where this is headed—AI. With the adoption and acceleration of AI, especially in the RIA space, what role do you see Schwab having when it comes to helping firms move from really that experimental phase into more of a true integration phase?

Alison Dooher: Well, I’ll tell you, this is the fastest thing I’ve seen go from new to norm in an incredibly short period of time. We see 60% of advisors actively using AI tools in their practice today. Another 30% are actively looking to implement some sort of AI tool within their practice. I don’t know what the other 10% are doing, but it’s coming for them.

First and foremost, we think there’s an opportunity for us to just help get information to advisors in a more efficient way. We’re internally testing that with our service professionals, and we have the opportunity next year to think about how we would externalize that directly on our platforms, but also via an API integration for third parties to pick it up and maybe integrate that content into their own models.

Shannon Rosic: Well, Schwab is certainly at the forefront when it comes to this. It’s always great to hear what you’re working on, and you always have a very clear vision, especially when it comes to the tech roadmap. So, Alison, thank you so much for your insights.

Alison Dooher: Thank you so much.

Shannon Rosic: For WealthManagement.com. I’m Shannon Rosic.

About the Author

Shannon Rosic

Director of WealthStack Content and Solutions, Informa Connect

Shannon Rosic is the Director of WealthStack Content & Solutions at Informa Connect. In this role, Ms. Rosic supports and drives the omni-channel growth and development of WealthStack, the fastest growing and most credible event dedicated to technology in the wealth management industry.  She also serves as the market-facing representative for the group, and regularly hosts webinars, podcasts and video series. 

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