The Institutional Ghost: Why Schwab is Winning the “Grazers”
Rick Wurster’s success at Schwab proves that under-40s don't want a "newsroom dinghy." They are looking for a winning platform built on removing friction.
I had one of those “drop everything you’re doing” moments this morning while watching Squawk Box. Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster was being interviewed, and he dropped a stat that should have every media exec reaching for their antacids.
One-third of all new retail clients at Schwab are Gen Z.
Let that sink in for a minute. Schwab is a 50-year-old legacy behemoth. It has actual branch locations and dusty “Wall Street” vibes. It’s the type of institution Gen Z and Millennials are supposed to be bulldozing into oblivion with trendy, millennial-pink trading apps. But Schwab isn’t just holding on. They’re getting younger.
I listen to a lot of news leaders talk about the “death of the young reader.” Frankly, for most organizations, I think the reality is they never really had them to begin with. When I worked at Lehigh Valley Public Media, news for markets younger than 35 wasn’t just a guess. We literally built LehighValleyNews.com to target the 25-49 age group. We didn’t do it because we wanted young people to revert to us. We did it because market research proved a gargantuan and untapped appetite for news in that demographic. We wanted to build for the audience newspapers weren’t capturing.
Later in the interview, Wurster revealed a mind-boggling trend from their 2024 Modern Wealth Survey. He noted that Gen Z is starting to invest at an average age of 19. To put that in perspective, Boomers didn’t start until they were 35.
Wurster identified what he calls a "bull market for convenience." It is a clever turn of phrase, but if you strip away the Wall Street jargon, the meaning is simple. In an era of infinite choice, the most valuable "commodity" a company can offer isn't a better product or a lower price. It is the removal of friction. Wurster is arguing that consumers are "investing" their loyalty in whoever makes their lives the easiest. In a world that feels increasingly complex, "convenience" has become a premium asset class.
Research (Not Just Reporting)
Let’s start with research. Millennials and Gen Z investors don’t just want to hear what you think. They want to see the numbers that got you there so they can draw their own conclusions. They want to know how you arrived at the answer, not just what the answer is. This desire for “showing your work” is why I’ve long argued young people don’t need more personality in our journalism. They need transparency.
Commenting on a prior piece of mine, Dr. Nicole Mirkin, a forensic psychologist, explained the phenomenon this way: When people can see how you arrived at a conclusion, it affects how they perceive that information. It makes it more legible. Schwab is winning because everything they do is built on legible documentation. They don’t just give you hot stock tips. They show you how they did their math.
Education (The Onboarding Strategy)
And then there’s education. Schwab doesn’t make you feel dumb for not knowing what an ETF is. They teach you what it is. In journalism we have what I call the “Curse of Knowledge.” We think our audience should know how government and corporations work because we went to school for a decade to learn it ourselves. But they didn’t. Winners don’t expect their audience to climb on board the newsroom dinghy halfway through the journey. They onboard their audiences.
Coaching (News-as-a-Service)
Which brings me to coaching. Coaching is the natural extension of education. It’s the bridge between reading something and being able to use what you read to improve your life. It’s the difference between reading the weather report and learning how to protect yourself from the elements.
When it comes to user experience, Gen Z won’t tolerate lazy work. If it doesn’t feel effortless to them, the research behind the product doesn’t actually exist to them. Enter startups like Particle.news who are stripping away the fat and letting millennials and Gen Z be who they are. They are highly-educated information consumers who value efficient products.
Particle isn’t just building a news aggregator. They’re building a damn fountain of knowledge for people who want to understand what’s happening to the world around them. You can literally toggle the news summary from “Explain Like I’m 5” to “The 5Ws.” It respects the reader enough to assume they want the data, but recognizes they are busy enough to need a performant product to sift through it.
The Strategy Inversions
Beyond their approach to news delivery, I think there are broader lessons Schwab’s success affords us. For starters, they win by “wrapping advice around the product.” Newsrooms are selling content. Articles are a commodity. We should be selling readers ways to navigate information. That’s the context that allows people to translate what they learn into actions they can take to improve their lives.
Take those brick-and-mortar locations. Schwab has hundreds of them, and even in a digital world, they serve a psychological purpose. When you see a building with a logo on the street, it creates a "Trust Floor." It signals to a young person that this isn't just an app that might disappear during a market crash. It’s a place that looks like it’s going to be here a while.
News organizations have to build that Trust Floor. If we aren’t embedding ourselves in communities as more than just websites, we’ll fade from memory when we log off. Trust isn’t social media-friendly. It’s built community by community and brick-and-mortar by brick-and-mortar.
Schwab is dipping their toe into cryptocurrency and prediction markets. Why? Because, according to Wurster, they aren’t trying to compete with what young people are already doing. They are meeting them where they are by giving them a “protected” way to do it. Newsrooms should be dipping their toes into platform-native news and technologies, too. But instead of running from them we should be the ones inoculating them with journalistic standards. If we don’t, old brands will be replaced with influencers and culture peddlers. Let’s be the ones providing trusted answers in those spaces instead.
The Takeaway
As I’m working through strategy at the American Press Institute on initiatives like Metrics for News and Source Matters, I keep flashing back to Mr. Wurster this morning. Young people don’t lack interest in what’s going on in the world. What they lack is trust that what we offer helps them live their life better.
In a “bull market for convenience,” winning isn’t about who has the most readers. It’s about who makes the truth the easiest to find, understand, and USE. No matter if you oversee a billion-dollar news organization or a 10 trillion-dollar brokerage, the game is the same.
We don’t need to lead them to the water. We need to build a better faucet.
Where is the "friction" in your organization today? If we are truly in a bull market for convenience, what is the one process or product feature you would cut right now to make life easier for a 19-year-old reader? Let me know in the comments.
P.S. — Did this analysis provide you with a breakthrough strategy?
If so, please consider making a one-time tip to support the deep research and analysis that goes into every Backstory & Strategy post.
Additionally, if you found this post helpful, please restack it and share it with your audience. This spreads the word and keeps me writing the types of content you enjoy.