The Charles Schwab Corporation (NYSE:SCHW) 2022 Fall Business Update Conference Call October 27, 2022 1:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Jeff Edwards - MD, IR

Walt Bettinger - Co-Chairman and CEO

Rick Wurster - President

Peter Crawford - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Ken Worthington - JPMC

Rich Repetto - Piper Sandler

Dan Fannon - Jefferies

Steven Chubak - Wolfe Research

Devin Ryan - JMP Securities

Kyle Voigt - KBW

Brian Bedell - Deutsche Bank

Bill Katz - Credit Suisse

Michael Cyprys - Morgan Stanley

Brennan Hawken - UBS

Jeff Edwards

And we’re on. Hi, Everyone, and welcome to Schwab’s 2022 Fall Business Update. This is Jeff Edwards, Managing Director of Investor Relations, and I’m joined today by our Co-Chairman and CEO, Walt Bettinger; President, Rick Wurster; and CFO, Peter Crawford.

We have a [Texas’ size] amount of ground to cover today, so I’m going to do my best to not be the bottleneck here. However, I do want to cover a few items before we jump into prepared remarks. Per standard setup, I’ll help moderate Q&A following management’s presentation. We will be accepting questions via both the phone line and the web console for the usual. One thing that’s important to note is starting with today’s update, we are implementing a 1 question only, no follow-up format. However, we certainly encourage folks to jump back into the queue if additional questions come to mind. And of course, you can always check back in with IR after the session with any questions. As always, today’s slides will be posted to the IR site at the start of Peter’s portion of the programming.

And finally, please don’t forget about the enduring wall of words, which reminds us all that the future is uncertain please stay up to date with our disclosures. With that, Walt, take it away.

Walt Bettinger

[Technical Difficulty] ...that began in 2020 and many others. And in each of these time periods, there was a list of doubters. In fact, I recently went back and read some of the reports and articles that were written about Schwab during those periods. And although I generally respect those who doubted us, I have enormous confidence in our firm and in our people. I have enormous confidence in our ability to serve our 30-million-plus clients, and enormous confidence in our ability to deliver for our long-term stockholders.

As we all know, the third quarter was very difficult for investors. The Federal Reserve continued with an aggressive policy designed to battle deep-seated inflation -- they did so with steep increases in rates, and at the same time, equity markets fell for the third consecutive quarter.