The Charles Schwab Corporation is a Financial Services / Brokerage & Wealth Management company with $18.8B in 2024 revenue and 36K employees worldwide. Charles Schwab Corporation occupies a unique position in American financial services: it is simultaneously one of the oldest names in discount brokerage and one of the most actively evolving financial technology platforms in the country. Founded in the early 1970s and publicly traded since 1987 (with a brief period of private ownership from 1983 to 1987 under BankAmerica), the company has survived and thrived through market crashes in 1987, 2000 to 2002, 2008 to 2009, and 2020, each time emerging with a larger share of a growing market. As of 2025, Schwab's operational footprint spans approximately 380 branch offices across the United States, a digital platform serving tens of millions of self-directed investors, an institutional custody operation serving over 14,000 independent RIA firms, and a federally chartered bank with over $300 billion in assets. The company's workforce of approximately 36,000 employees is distributed across its Westlake, Texas headquarters, operational centers in Phoenix, Denver, Indianapolis, and other cities, and the branch network. The company's governance structure features a board of directors with deep financial services expertise, a founding chairman emeritus in Charles R. Schwab himself—who remains an active board presence and significant shareholder—and a management team led by CEO Rick Wurster, who assumed the role in January 2024 following the planned transition from longtime CEO Walter Bettinger. The continuity of strategic vision between Bettinger's tenure (2008 to 2023) and Wurster's early leadership has been notable, with no dramatic pivots from the core investor-first positioning that has defined the Schwab brand for five decades.