Nevis wants AI agents that act. Schwab says not yet

The Charles Schwab Corporation has invested in Nevis’ $70 million Series B as the startup aims to have its AI agents open accounts and handle other operations for RIAs on Schwab’s custody platform.

“We need to have a very strong relationship with our partners like Schwab in order to both read information but also take action on the Schwab platform, whether that’s opening custody accounts or going further into those operations. We think that there’s still a huge opportunity to connect more and to do more as we take action with agents and systems like Schwab and others,” Nevis co-founder and CEO Mark Swan said on a panel at last week’s Schwab IMPACT conference in Boston.

The agentic AI activity from Nevis differs from Schwab’s Claude for Financial Advisors setup, which the custodian has limited to read-only access. Anthropic’s tool can analyze client information for advisors but cannot automatically act on accounts the way Swan envisions.

“Today, we do not allow agents to act on any information at Schwab,” said Alison Dooher, head of AI for Schwab Advisor Services. “We’re starting with read-only, meaning that we cannot act on the data. And further, we’re masking certain components of the data, so we will be masking account numbers, and we’re not passing things like social security numbers.”

A path to two-way access

Schwab CEO Rick Wurster said the firm has been actively blocking unauthorized AI agents that try to access investor accounts. But as the brokerage and custodial giant walks a fine line between data-protection concerns and agentic AI activity, executives indicate that Schwab’s AI agent access will eventually expand beyond read-only to taking action on client accounts and advisor workflows.

“Maybe next year we’ll be talking about bidirectional,” Jon Beatty, head of Schwab Advisor Services, told InvestmentNews at the conference, referring to AI agents that could not only read data from Schwab but also act on accounts.

“The aspiration for all of us is as we get more confident and more secure in what we’re doing to make the interactions bidirectional. Right now, they’re single directional, and that would then enhance these tools’ ability to drive even more workflow efficiency,” said Beatty. “But we will only do that when we have enough experience and we think the right framework to keep everybody safe.”

Nevis eyes agents moving money

Nevis has grown its assets from $50 billion to $700 billion in 2026, and the startup now eyes access to the 17,000 RIAs that custody with Schwab. Focus Financial Partners, IEQ Capital and the Creative Planning-owned United Capital are also clients of Nevis.

New survey data from Schwab found that only 7% of advisors said they use agentic AI, defined in the survey as systems that make decisions and take actions independently within workflows. At Schwab’s conference, Swan described AI agents moving money between accounts for advisors as something he expects to become common over the next 12 months.

“I think advisors will have literally hundreds of agents supporting them with a broad range of services to clients. You will have agents that build wealth and estate plans, agents that will file taxes on behalf of clients. You will have agents that are opening custody accounts and moving money,” said Swan, a Scottish entrepreneur in his 20s who was a software intern at Amazon in 2020.

Nevis says its AI agents have completed more than 100,000 operational tasks for advisors, including account opening and generating personalized financial plans and prospect proposals.

“We [have] over 10 customers that have fully replaced their CRM and are able to then use that to completely automate back-office workflows,” added Swan.