Schwab offers $4,800 credit to cover Claude enterprise seat cost for RIAs

Schwab is offering $4,800 in credits to RIAs who sign up for the Claude enterprise plan, which requires a 20-seat minimum and comes with stronger security protocols than other Claude plans offered by Anthropic.  

The offer is available through Nov. 30 to firms who newly sign up for enterprise plans, which charge $20 per user per month with a required minimum of 20 seats. At that rate, Schwab’s $4,800 credit offer effectively covers one year of seat access for the enterprise plan, but firms would still incur additional token costs for their usage.  

“The intention of the credit is to really help smaller firms ensure that the cost to the 20 seats becomes kind of net neutral for them,” said Alison Dooher, head of AI for Schwab Advisor Services. “We do mostly recommend with Anthropic that the enterprise plan, given the additional compliance and security features, is a better option for advisors.” 

Out of the nearly 17,000 RIAs that custody with Schwab, about 11,000 manage under $100 million in assets as small firms. These firms typically have below 20 advisors, meaning Anthropic's 20-seat minimum enterprise plan would provide them with more access than needed. The enterprise plan’s $20 seat fee matches Anthropic’s Team plan when billed annually, but unlike Team, it doesn’t include usage tokens. Tokens are billed separately at API rates. 

“Schwab has asked advisors to ensure that they are using one of the commercial plans, because those are the plans that actually allow you to set security settings,” Dooher said at Schwab’s IMPACT conference in Boston. 

Dooher told InvestmentNews last month that Schwab’s integration with Claude will prevent Anthropic from retaining data for model training, which is normally a protection only offered through enterprise plans. Schwab is limiting its Claude integration to read-only, meaning the AI will be able to view and analyze advisor input such as account and client information, but Claude cannot act on data to place trades, move money, or other actions. 

“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 number,” said Dooher. “So today, because we're in a read-only environment, we do not allow agents to act on any information at Schwab.” 

Several industry consultants have tried to estimate the actual cost a small RIA would pay for Claude for Financial Advisors. 

A 10-advisor RIA turns on Claude for Financial Advisors. "At $70 to $120 per user per month — Anthropic's own ballpark — that's somewhere between $8,400 and $14,400 a year,” wrote ThrivAI CEO Aaron Steinberg, adding those estimates come, “before setup, before training, before anyone's time spent configuring nine-plus connectors and deciding what the compliance skill should actually be checking for.” 

While Schwab’s $4,800 credit would offset a year’s worth of seat fees under Anthropic’s enterprise plan, Valmark Financial Group chief information officer Geoff Moore wrote in a LinkedIn post that token usage could cost from $75 to over $300 monthly per advisor. 

“Anthropic's guidance is that you will like spend in the neighborhood of $75 to $120 per month. Based on my own observations of advisors I think that is reasonable. However, we also have advisors that are paying north of $300. It just depends on what you are doing and how you are doing it,” Moore wrote.