{"id":863929,"date":"2026-09-28T20:44:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T20:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863929\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T20:44:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T20:44:12","slug":"schwabs-strategy-chief-shares-playbook-for-private-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863929\/","title":{"rendered":"Schwab’s strategy chief shares playbook for private market"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wall Street is aggressively pushing to get retail investors in on hot deals in the fast-growing marketplace for pre-IPO shares<\/a>. <\/p>\n

That’s why it’s worth looking closely at moves being made<\/a> by Charles Schwab<\/a>, a brokerage powerhouse that knows a thing or two about broadening access for everyday investors. Where Schwab goes, so go its nearly 50 million brokerage accounts, so it’s important to watch how the brokerage plays in the pre-IPO sweepstakes. <\/p>\n

\"andrew_d'anna_schwab\"<\/a> andrew_d’anna_schwab <\/p>\n

Andrew D’Anna <\/p>\n

Charles Schwab <\/p>\n

To get a look at that playbook, PitchBook News interviewed Andrew D’Anna, Schwab’s managing director for investment platforms and strategy, about how the firm’s recently closed acquisition of Forge Global fits into its private-market roadmap. Forge offers accredited investors a platform to trade shares in late-stage private companies, and it manages employee stock programs, which help underpin the secondary market for these equities. <\/p>\n

The following are edited excerpts from the conversation. <\/p>\n

PitchBook: Looking back, when did Schwab decide it wanted to get closer to, and ultimately acquire, Forge Global? <\/p>\n

D’Anna: We’ve been in the alts business for quite some time\u2014much more than a year\u2014serving advisors and custody on our platform. More recently, we released an alts platform on the retail side that meaningfully broadened exposure. That generated interest in direct share and pre-IPO access, which really came into force early last year. <\/p>\n

At the time, I was COO of our retail business, leading the ultra-high-net-worth segment, and I was hearing much more frequently clients asking how we could help them gain exposure to the growth they were seeing among pre-IPO companies. That got us looking at pathways clients could use to gain access responsibly, talking to a number of marketplace platforms, and evaluating partnership versus acquisition. <\/p>\n

How did the conversation with Forge evolve into acquisition talks? <\/p>\n

There was no surprise when we started, because we began open to partnering\u2014acquisition came later. Forge had deliberately built a platform to integrate with multiple partners, on both distribution and supply. Their technology strategy was built around APIs letting partners build a front-end connecting into their core marketplace and central order book. That architecture was attractive because we want an integrated experience where clients see this asset class within their Schwab account, not as a separate product. <\/p>\n

How does this opportunity compare to other growth areas across Schwab? <\/p>\n

Without sharing specific projections, I’d put private markets alongside digital assets and tokenization as frontier asset-class areas\u2014all relatively in the overall scale of Schwab today, but focus areas because we see them becoming meaningful for clients and, therefore, significant growth opportunities. <\/p>\n

What structural shifts are driving that demand? <\/p>\n

Private companies are staying private longer, so much more value creation happens pre-IPO, out of reach of everyday public-market investors. They see IPO performance in the hundreds of billions or trillions and want access to that wealth creation. That’s why we’re investing to build a retail wealth market for pre-IPO shares that doesn’t really exist today and needs to be built at scale, responsibly. <\/p>\n

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How mature is the ecosystem around this market? <\/p>\n

The GP-managed fund environment for private equity, venture and private credit is fairly mature for the wealth channel, but it doesn’t extend much beyond accredited or qualified-purchaser investors, and it doesn’t offer exposure at the individual issuer level the way public markets do. <\/p>\n

Direct share access is far less mature and lacks the institutional intermediaries other alts categories have. Stakeholders include investors seeking exposure, issuers who care deeply about their cap tables and trading terms, and existing owners\u2014early investors, employees, fund managers\u2014seeking liquidity. Building on Forge means bringing Schwab’s scale and trust to all three. <\/p>\n

What’s your approach to price discovery? <\/p>\n

Our approach is to put as much pricing information as possible in investors’ hands and build liquidity on the marketplace to support more robust pricing. Forge has built what it calls Forge Price, which combines public funding-round data with actual transactional data on the platform to generate pricing available to all buyers and sellers. That will only improve as we scale and bring more volume and data onto the platform. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on PitchBook News<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wall Street is aggressively pushing to get retail investors in on hot deals in the fast-growing marketplace for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":863930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[28,19777,217861,168698,112,21260,248031],"class_list":["post-863929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-markets","tag-business","tag-charles-schwab","tag-everyday-investors","tag-forge","tag-markets","tag-retail-investors","tag-secondary-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}