Welcome to the 2022 Winter Business Update. Please welcome Rich Fowler.
All right, we are live. Welcome, everyone, to the Schwab Winter 2022 Business Update. I'm Rich Fowler, head of the investor relations function for Schwab, and thanks so much for joining us virtually today. I think we'd all hoped, or at least many of us or some of us, anyway, had hoped we'd be doing this event together down in Texas. But for better or worse, here we are, starting the second all-webcast winter update from our various perches across the country. You can rest assured that our desire remains to resume holding the winter updates in person just as soon as conditions permit. In the meantime, now that we've all had some practice with this, we're confidently bringing you another nine-speaker lineup from multiple locations nationwide, courtesy of our incredible events team.
We hope you and your families are safe and well wherever you are, and keep your Stetsons and Tony Lamas ready to go for next year, and off we go. First, let's take a look at today's lineup. Walt will start us off, followed by our President, Rick Wurster, sharing his perspectives on current focus and opportunities going forward. Our Chief Digital Officer, Neesha Hathi, will spend time on all things digital, including work on the client experience front and some interesting progress with investment solutions. Jonathan Craig and Stacy Hammond will once again talk about goings-on in retail, and Lorraine Gavican Kerr will join us for the first time to discuss aspects of our investor education efforts. Bernie Clark will speak to advisor services. Joe Martinetto will provide an update on our integration and scale work.
Then Peter, of course, will wrap up with the ever-popular financial picture. Let's go to the agenda. Just to lay out the timing, please note that we're combining the Q&A sessions in a couple of places. You can also see we do have several breaks planned. My esteemed colleague, Mr. Jeff Edwards from IR, will be the one restarting the sessions. When you see his rugged visage appear, not mine, that's the signal that we're gonna get going again, and we'll expect to finish around 12:30 P.M. Pacific Time. To help you follow along during the day, a PDF of the agenda, including detailed timing, is posted on the console. Let's talk about the setup for Q&A.
As you can see there on the screen, we need to take questions once again solely via the webcast console, so you can submit them during each speaker's prepared remarks or during Q&A itself. Jeff will organize the questions, and he will moderate the sessions. Forward-looking statements, of course. The wonderful wall of words has to make an appearance, at least briefly. Please just, as always, remember that we're talking about the future and inevitably, therefore, expectations and forecasts, et cetera. Things will change, of course, as the world moves on, so please stay in touch with our disclosures. A few last thoughts and I'll get out of the way. The slides will be posted on the IR site as usual at the beginning of Peter's session.
A replay will be available as soon as possible, likely later today, and then it'll be posted at schwabevents.com. We're really excited to continue sharing an expanded view of the company with you during today's update. We hope you'll find it worthwhile and helping to deepen your understanding of our strategy and performance. But as always, we welcome your feedback as we think about learnings for the structure and content of future updates. With that, Walt, I'm gonna hand it off to you.
Thank you, Rich, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I have to admit, I'm tired of doing these virtually, even though we continue to make progress with the technology and make it more efficient for everyone. I sure wish we were together in person, and I clearly look forward to that, as Rich said, just as soon as possible. But I'm excited about this year's meeting. This is going to be the first time that I'll have the opportunity to share my segment with our new president, Rick Wurster. I'm going to speak on some of the bigger picture issues, as well as taking a look back at last year, at 2021. Then Rick's going to cover some forward-looking areas.
Then, after his comments, we'll go ahead and do a joint Q&A session. Just for some background, I personally recruited Rick to Schwab. We've worked together very closely in the years since as his responsibilities have grown to where they are today. With the market cap of the company growing approximately tenfold since I became CEO and the size and complexity of the company growing similarly, it's gonna be a real benefit for me to be able to share some of the day-to-day duties that I've been responsible for over the last 15 years with Rick. Getting into our discussion today, 2021 was a superb year for Schwab, really by any measure, whether you look at metrics or financial results, client results or progress on our integration with Ameritrade.
As I look forward to 2022, it promises also to be another outstanding year. We have a series of new client capabilities that we'll be unveiling this year. Our integration with Ameritrade is on track, and of course, Joe's gonna speak on that a little bit later today. Our firm is strong with a solid balance sheet. Peter Crawford will discuss that. Importantly, our employees remain committed to our firm as well as our clients while we offer what we believe to be industry-leading work location flexibility. I guess to top it off, the interest rate environment does appear at this point to be headed to a place that is more favorable to us. Of course, talking about what isn't changing is our focus on clients.
Our strategy through client size that all of you are familiar with, as well as our commitment to the virtuous cycle. Why don't we go ahead and start through the slides, and I'll start with a brief look back at 2021. The environment last year was choppy, but generally it improved for the equity markets. Long-term interest rates began to move modestly upwards, but of course, they remained at year-end quite a bit below what we might consider traditional levels. The VIX stayed in a fairly tight range, except for a couple periods. Of course, we're all very familiar with the extreme volatility in early 2021. Then there was another spike in the fourth quarter of last year.
I think what's most important is by year-end, if you look at investor sentiment, it began to slide. We can debate all the reasons behind that. Certainly some of them had to be the movement of inflation, the prospect for higher rates and it seems realistic to assume that uncertainty with the pandemic and all the various strains contributed to that decline in investor sentiment also. Now from a growth standpoint, 2021 was pretty extraordinary. I really don't use that word lightly. I don't like to go into superlatives, but it was an extraordinary year. Our core net new assets exceeded $550 billion. So that's an 8% growth rate on a very large existing client base.
If you look at December alone, that net new, that core net new asset figure was in excess of $80 billion. Over $80 billion in a single month. Again, why I guess I'm willing to use words like extraordinary when I talk about 2021. For the overall year, that was an increase in our pro forma 2020 core net new assets of about 42%. Really strong growth. Another way to think about it is that last year, 2021, our core net new assets were greater than what we generated in 2018 and 2019 combined. When we look underneath this rate of growth, it's really all about trust.
This rate of growth reflects the trust that our clients have in us, and it serves as a daily reminder of the responsibility that we have to make decisions and to take actions that continue to validate that trust. Moving to the next slide. In addition to the record levels of core net new assets, client activity was also strong, flows into Schwab managed products also expanded throughout 2021. Then looking at things from a financial standpoint, the year exceeded our expectations really almost across the board. I did just want to call particular attention to our adjusted pre-tax margin for the year, which was at about 47.5%. I want to emphasize that that's a figure that we believe has room to expand further in the future.
Of course, at the same time, as always, we take a long-term view in building our business. Part of that long-term view is to ensure that we are rewarding and investing in our employees, because as we know after all, everything we do to serve clients begins with our employees and their dedication. I think that we've taken a very thoughtful approach to the pandemic. In many ways, I believe it to be an industry-leading approach. From the feedback we've received from our employees, they value just how careful we've been, as well as how flexible we've been ensuring their safety, while at the same time striving to be in a position to best serve our clients.
Not surprising for those of you who follow our company closely, our strategic initiatives, they remain timeless, and they are the focus of all of our efforts, whether it be in the scale and efficiency side, a win-win monetization or client segmentation. I think that as you look at last year, you should be able to evaluate each of the moves we made, whether it was an acquisition or project investments, product introductions, enhanced capabilities, everything fits fairly clearly into one or more of those initiatives. I'd like to take just a brief minute and look at highlights maybe for each one of the three. Under scale and efficiency, we remain on track. I know it's very important to all of you who follow the company closely.
We remain on track to meet the expense savings that we initially projected as part of the acquisition of Ameritrade. Similarly, our operating expenses continue to decline as a percent of client assets. This solidifies our belief that we are the low-cost provider among full-service investment firms. That's incredibly important for us because it ensures that we have the ongoing opportunity for us to disruptively lower costs for clients, continue to grow the firm, and in certain cases, apply pressure to firms that we might be competing with. Now taking a look under win-win monetization, again, we saw strong growth in our Schwab Managed Investment Solutions, as well as our lending solutions. With the introduction of our new relationship with T.
Rowe Price, we took what I would call an important first step in better serving clients who are interested in active asset management from what is undeniably one of the premier money managers in the industry. I know that Rick is going to speak in more detail about this, about just how powerful we believe our strategic relationship with T. Rowe Price is going to prove to be both for our clients as well as for our financials. We're also investing aggressively in enhancing our segmentation efforts. We have a particular emphasis on our fastest-growing retail client segment, and that is high-net-worth investors who are largely self-directed. We continue to have success attracting younger investors with about 60% of our new-to-firm households last year under the age of 40. Let's go ahead and move the discussion up one level.
I wanna go ahead and restate our commitment to clients and why we believe that clients trust us when it comes to the decisions they make about where to invest or save their hard-earned dollars. Really comes down to four key objectives that we strive for every day, and we strive to deliver these to our clients. Outstanding value, world-class service, in an environment, of course, where every interaction is as clear, simple, and transparent as we can make it, and done in the way that we would want to be treated based on the golden rule. Because trust is the wrapper that ties everything together at Schwab. As in prior years, we had a series of independent third parties who recognize these efforts.
I'd like to say that, you know, far more important than what the third parties say is that clients and prospects recognize our commitments as well as our efforts. We had a firm-wide transfer ratio in 2021 versus all competitors that was approximately 1.6-one , and a growth rate in client assets that I think compares favorably to any of our publicly traded competitors, who of course issue audited metrics to the public. I wanted to comment that some of you might notice that this 1.60 TOA ratio is just slightly less than levels that we've achieved in some years in the past. This is almost entirely attributable to the TOA ratios at the former Ameritrade. Ameritrade historically has operated with a sub 1.0 TOA ratio.
Much of that is because on the retail side, it's the way they tend to attract new clients. They typically would come to Ameritrade with cash, but if they were to switch firms, they would often just leave with their securities in place. Now, we do believe that there is significant room for us to improve Ameritrade's historic TOA ratio because we have a much broader set of solutions for clients. Therefore, many of the reasons that these clients may have left Ameritrade in the past, we think we can show them great reasons for them to remain with Schwab as we move forward. As we sit here today, I feel confident in saying that we've really only just begun. Our market share is modest domestically by really any measurement.
With our leadership position in the two fastest-growing segments of the U.S. retail wealth market, we think we're poised to drive strong organic growth in the coming years. Now, just to wrap up, and before I turn it over to Rick, I wanna take a moment to share with everyone one very, very important thought. I have the honor and the pleasure of meeting with many of you throughout the year, of course, virtually over the last 24 months or so. Every one of those meetings is important to me, and I learn from them. I learn from your questions, I learn from your challenges and your insights.
My goal is that when you end a meeting, whether it's with me or with really any of our Schwab executives, we want you to feel that you have spent time with the most open and the most transparent company in the investment services industry. Now, you might say, "Well, why does this matter?" Or "Why does it matter to me?" It matters because transparency is the bright light. What transparency does is it ensures that you can evaluate our actions, whether they be from the past, from the present or ones that we talk about in the future. Whether they be ones that are based on the short run or on the long term, you can see how they fit together. You can hold us accountable.
You can see how our commitment to clients, employees, and our stockholders are always consistent. I think those actions stand tall under this bright light of transparency. Rick, let me turn it over to you, and we'll cover some forward-looking thoughts.
Thank `you, Walt. My son recently asked me to take him out to buy several items for his first water polo tournament. He had his older sister's gear and wanted some for himself. The closest swim store to us is about a 20-minute drive, so I told him, "Well, we can go now and spend the afternoon shopping, or we can order it online, have it here in time for the game and go play basketball." Thankfully, he chose the easy path. We decided to lean into ease. I didn't coin that phrase, but as we talk through our strategic focus areas today, one of the recurring themes is the concept of ease.
Whether it is our investments in our digital experiences, adding to the breadth of what a client can do at Schwab, or meeting the specific needs of our segments, making things easy on the client is a consistent theme across our strategic focus areas. As I look at opportunities on the horizon, our through client size approach remains a winning strategy. With this as our North Star, we will continue to build on our strengths, challenge the status quo, and deliver for clients by aligning to our three critical focus areas, scale and efficiency, win-win monetization, and client segmentation. At the same time, we will continue to make investments in our people, technology, and digital capabilities to deliver on these strategic priorities in a way that builds on our strengths. I'll turn now to the opportunities I see within each strategic focus area, starting with scale and efficiency.
Three years ago, we had 11.6 million active brokerage accounts. Today, we have 33.2 million. Our expense on client assets has dropped from 16 basis points in 2018 to an adjusted EOCA of 13 basis points in the fourth quarter of 2021. This allows us to invest back in clients to create new capabilities and experiences, fulfilling the virtuous cycle you've heard Walt discuss. As I think about scale and efficiency going forward, I wanna highlight three priorities. First, integrating Ameritrade remains the critical priority, and you'll hear more about our progress from Joe Martinetto later. Second, we'll continue to make it even easier for clients to do business with us. Think about where we are today, our branches, our 24/7 service levels, our relationship models, and our digital experiences. These strengths all combine to make things easy for clients.
Looking to the future, I believe leaning into ease is a great way of continuing our success, as I believe ease is a significant driver of who wins across industries. To build on our heritage and lean into ease, we'll continue to invest in making our client experiences easier, and we'll continue expanding our offerings over time, integrating and bundling experiences to create more simplicity in a client's financial life. Rounding out the opportunities for scale and efficiency, we'll continue to enhance our operating model. Schwab has grown tremendously in the last 10-15 years, and we're integrating the largest acquisition in our industry's history, creating client and stockholder value. While this growth has come with increased competition and regulatory oversight, it also comes with greater opportunity to deliver additional services to an even larger client base.
We'll continue to evolve our operating model to make sure it's built for the future, allowing us to compete and innovate in a timely manner while continuing to manage risk and our regulatory environment. Turning to win-win monetization, Schwab has great opportunity ahead to lead in three key areas where we know there is growing client demand, wealth management, asset management, and lending. We'll pursue these opportunities the Schwab way, by delivering the solutions our clients want at great value to them, creating a win for clients and a win for Schwab. I'll go into detail on these in a minute. Our third focus area remains client segmentation. We have a diverse and growing client base, and we'll continue investing in our strengths to meet the specific needs and preferences of a range of investors.
We'll talk about actions we are taking to build on our strengths with high-net-worth investors, ESG investors, and active traders. We're also focused on delivering the solutions and experiences that our RIA clients need, and Bernie will discuss that in more detail later. Let's turn to the win-win monetization opportunities, starting with wealth management. We see strong demand for advice. We're participating in the growth of advice by serving RIAs in our advisor services business, by providing product choice for all clients, by providing advice to our self-directed clients managing their own wealth, and by providing wealth solutions to our retail clients. Today, 18% of Schwab retail assets and 7% of Ameritrade retail assets are in an advised solution. As a group, these clients have the highest client promoter scores at Schwab.
We also generate a return on client assets that averages in the mid-60s for our retail advised solutions, though ROCA ranges from the high teens for something like SIP up to about 90 basis points for other offers. This is a win-win, and we have many ways to serve more clients and deepen our relationships with them. Specifically, we are investing in our Schwab Private Client or SPC program, which is currently $170 billion.
We've already taken a number of steps to accelerate growth by enhancing the client experience, including hiring almost 200 incremental client-facing staff to make sure we have the capacity to serve existing clients while continuing to grow, improving our marketing and launching a new series of events and experiences exclusive to SPC clients, and by building a plan to enhance our client experience over time, including adding even greater flexibility to our investment capabilities and greater digital interactions. Expanding advice at Schwab and Ameritrade is a win-win. We have a great opportunity to serve more of those among our 16 million retail households who want personalized guidance while also pursuing an attractive growth opportunity. Let's turn to the second win-win opportunity on the horizon, asset management. On the left, you see the growth of our revenue from asset management and administrative fees, or AMAF.
After a couple of steady years, we saw a 12% year-over-year increase in AMAF revenue in 2021. This was driven by market returns, growth of our advised solutions, including Wasmer, and the addition of Ameritrade. As we think about growing our asset management business going forward, we have four guiding principles. First, through clients' eyes remains our strategic North Star. Second, where we have expertise, we will offer proprietary products and solutions at great value. Index investing and its next evolution, personalized indexing, are two examples where we can build on our strengths. Third, in areas where we don't choose to compete directly, we will provide clients with choice while also relying upon the proven expertise of other managers, and we'll continue to look for ways to create win-win partnerships for clients and Schwab. Finally, we believe that more personalized investing solutions are the future of asset management.
With a combination of our strong record in index investing, our digital capabilities, and our distribution, Schwab has an opportunity to be a real leader here. I'll share a couple of examples of our strategy in action, starting with our third-party platform business. We've spoken about pursuing strategic relationships that benefit clients with third-party asset managers in asset categories where we do not compete. Our recently announced strategic relationship with T. Rowe Price is the first example of this. We selected T. Rowe based on the combination of their investment performance strength, their culture of low fees, and breadth of active product capabilities. This provides clients with a couple of immediate benefits. First, our RIA client base will be able to access the lowest cost share class of 120 of T. Rowe's actively managed funds with no transaction fee.
This makes Schwab the only brokerage platform where every RIA can access these share classes for all of their clients with no transaction fee, putting more money to work for the RIA's clients. Second, our retail clients will benefit as well. Our clients told us they were overwhelmed by choice during the process of selecting a fund. We're introducing a new fund research experience that is intended to help the self-directed retail investor cut through the clutter and simplify the decision-making process. The redesigned fund shopping journey will make it easier for clients to select mutual funds that meet their goals and align with the criteria they value, including Morningstar ratings, low expense ratios, and no transaction fees, while also highlighting proprietary funds and funds from T. Rowe Price. This differentiated relationship will also benefit Schwab and T. Rowe Price.
While we won't discuss the specifics, the economics are appealing to us relative to a third-party servicing agreement, and we could see increased revenue over time if clients make greater use of T. Rowe Price funds on our platform. We think this demonstrates Schwab's ability to thoughtfully build a select number of deep and complementary strategic relationships that are a win for our clients, a win for Schwab, and also a win for the strategic provider. The second example of our strategy in action is on the proprietary asset management side of our business. Our proprietary asset management business has consistently delivered high-quality investment products at great value, driving down the cost of investing across the entire industry, democratizing access and enhancing Schwab's overall value proposition for clients.
Looking ahead, Schwab has an opportunity to be a leader in direct indexing, giving our indexing expertise, our digital strength, and our willingness to be disruptive. We've launched the employee pilot for Schwab Personalized Indexing, and that is helping us prepare for the retail and advisor launch that will come this year, and Neesha will spend more time on this in a few minutes. Finally, we continue to see additional upside across our proprietary managed solutions business. In 2021, approximately $20 billion of new assets came into proprietary managed solutions, and demand for these products continues to grow. Now I'd like to turn to the third area of win-win opportunity, bank lending. About 16 million retail households and more than 12,000 RIA firms come to Schwab for the asset side of their balance sheet. Most of these investors go somewhere else for the liability side.
Our lending business is growing quickly, with a CAGR of more than 20% over the last five years. We've seen strong growth in Schwab's pledged asset line, or PAL, and mortgage lending balances. At year-end, total balances were nearly $34 billion. Today, about 2% of clients turn to Schwab for their borrowing needs. There is a great amount of potential upside. We estimate that if we can increase our bank lending penetration among clients by an incremental 3%-5%, this could represent an incremental revenue opportunity of approximately $1 billion, and this is a win for clients. Our clients are asking for this, and they often get industry-leading low rates here at Schwab. The chart also shows that our bank loan balances as a percentage of our balance sheet assets is approximately 5.1%.
You're familiar with competitors where that is higher, and we believe there is room for it to be higher here as well. We know our clients' assets. We believe there is opportunity to maintain our low credit risk profile while still expanding our lending. To pursue this opportunity, we'll maintain our risk-conscious approach while leaning into ease by building out a digital industry-leading borrowing experience. We also see an opportunity to extend our offerings in terms of types of loans, which in turn will help us deepen and strengthen relationships with RIAs, our high-net-worth clients, and other segments. Earlier, I mentioned shopping online for my son's water polo tournament. What I like most about that as an experience is that it's easy to transact, and I can also find lots of different things on the site.
The win-win monetization opportunities I just described will make it easier for clients to turn to Schwab for more of the things they need in their financial life, and that is a win for them and a win for us. Before I close, I'll spend just a couple of minutes on client segmentation. To be clear, Schwab will continue to serve a broad range of investors. What I'm focusing on today are opportunities to build on some of our strengths with specific groups. Approximately $2.7 trillion in retail assets at Schwab are households with more than $1 million in assets. These are our fastest-growing segments, and we have additional opportunity with them. First, we are investing in service to make it easier for this group to do business at Schwab. Second, we are investing in advice capabilities specific to the needs of this segment.
Finally, we are building new products and services such as lending alternatives and liquidity capabilities to make it even easier for these clients to meet the breadth of their financial needs here at Schwab. At the same time, we are also investing our strengths in serving a diverse and growing client base. Schwab is well-positioned to meet the needs of younger investors with capabilities like Schwab Stock Slices and the Schwab Starter Kit. Schwab Investing Themes, which Neesha will cover later, will make it easy for our trading-oriented clients to engage in themes of interest while providing options for ESG-minded investors. Speaking of ESG, this brings me to the next client segment. About 75% of investors under 40 are interested in sustainable investing.
Schwab is addressing this demand in a number of ways, including the recent launch of the Schwab Ariel ESG ETF and the Wasmer Schroeder Positive Impact Strategies, and the upcoming launch of personalized indexing. The third client segment I'll highlight is active traders, a segment that drives a meaningful portion of our economics. In the third quarter of 2021, where we have comparison data, there were 5.5 million daily average trades at Schwab. Our closest competitor was at 3.7 million. We are going to continue to invest in thinkorswim as the go-forward active trading platform and build on the strong educational content and capabilities that we have in place today. I'll wrap up where I started, our through client's eyes strategy. Always keeping the client at the forefront has given Schwab distinct competitive advantages.
Our size, operating structure, and operating efficiency give us the ability to meet client needs at scale. Our brand and reputation are reinforced every single day by our client-first service culture, and our willingness to disrupt the status quo for the benefit of investors is in our DNA. Through clients' eyes fuels the virtuous cycle. We will continue to put the client at the forefront. In doing so, we will continue to grow, and that will enable us to continue to invest in our business and serve our clients' needs by leaning into ease. We are doing well today, and with an estimated 12% market share, there is lots of room to grow. With through clients' eyes as our North Star, the future is very bright. With that, Walt will join me on the virtual stage to answer some questions.
Thank you, Walt. Thank you, Rick. Once again, as a reminder, everyone, apologies for any of the audio issues, and please continue to submit your questions through the webcast console. Walt, first question for you from Rich Repetto at Piper Sandler. Maybe you could talk a little about some of the recent market volatility and pullback and if we're seeing any impacts or changes amongst the client base.
Thanks, Jeff, and Rich, thank you for your question. I think what we've seen is what you would probably expect. Trading volumes have picked up a bit with the volatility, and there's some movement to cash, a relatively expected result during a downturn in the market. I do think it's early though to draw too many conclusions. Periodically we do see some buying on the dips. A bit more volatility, a bit more transactions, a bit more money to cash, but I think probably too early to draw any major conclusions.
Walt, another question for you from Bill Katz at Citigroup. As you and Rick and the rest of the management team look across the platform, do you see any additional opportunities for price actions or anything that might be influenced on that end as we potentially move towards a higher rate environment?
Well, I think we're always going to be looking for those. We probably aren't in a position to share potential actions that wouldn't necessarily be maybe the wisest move from a competitive standpoint. But Rick mentioned our EOCA or expense on client assets in the fourth quarter down to 13 basis points, and we have the ambition and I think the capability to continue to drive that number down further. As we do so with the virtuous cycle, it puts us in a position to share the fruits of that efficiency, some with our stockholders and some with our employees and certainly some with our clients.
What we'll look to always do at Schwab is find those price areas that are most meaningful to clients and apply the most disproportionate pressure on competitors that we can apply. That's been a strategy at Schwab for almost 50 years, and I don't see any reason why that would change. I don't know that we wanna talk about those specifics prior to the time we might actually take actions.
Now, Rick, maybe a question for you around the T. Rowe relationship that you mentioned. Can you maybe delve in a little bit more around how you went through selecting T. Rowe as the preferred partner as well, and I suspect you can't go into too much more detail, but any other you know, color commentary around the arrangement that you have with them?
Well, we can't discuss specifics of the economics. We do believe it gives us an opportunity to grow and improve our economics. We think it's a great economic relationship for us, for T. Rowe and importantly for clients. There's all kinds of client benefits that will come from this, and part of that goes to the opening part of your question, Jeff, which is why we selected T. Rowe. T. Rowe has been a great partner of ours over time, and someone that has delivered great investment performance to clients, has done so with very reasonable fees among active managers, and has a great breadth of product that's able to help us across equities, fixed income, and with their recent acquisition, potentially even in the alternatives space.
This is a partner that we've got a lot of confidence in, and it's one where we think that the economics will be beneficial to Schwab, but we also think, most importantly, this is great for clients, both on the RIA side and on the retail side.
Thanks. A natural follow-up there, another question from Bill Katz at Citigroup. You mentioned, you know, this relationship as being a start. How is Schwab thinking about its approach to democratization of alternative investment opportunities for the retail investor?
Well, I'd say on the alternatives side, there could be similar opportunities. I mean, the premise comes back to we surveyed our clients about what it was like to choose funds, and what we heard was the process can be overwhelming. You know, you come into Schwab, we stand for choice, and we will always have that choice. At the same time, if our clients are telling us they would like the process to be more streamlined, to be easier, we're gonna meet that opportunity. Building some of these relationships will help with that. As it relates specifically to alternatives, retail alternatives is something we're considering. We believe there is client demand there, which is why we're considering it.
As we do consider it would be a natural place for us to consider partnerships like this. We don't have alternative investing capabilities here at Charles Schwab. We have no plans to build alternative capability. We would look to work with partners in that area.
Walt, maybe switching back to you, a question from Thomas Paulson at Inflection Capital Management. How would you characterize Schwab's ability to meet peak service demands, both from a trading perspective and call center capacity, now versus perhaps some of the areas where we saw peak volume early in 2021?
Sure. Well, of course, it really comes down to the definition of peak, right? But I think from a technology standpoint, we have certainly invested significant money in 2021 and will continue to in 2022 and going forward. Peter will share some more details on that. It really is around peaks that are most important. People tend to get caught up in daily average trades. Daily average trades aren't really what drives your capacity needs. It's driven off, for example, trades in any given minute or in any given grouping of seconds.
What we've tried to do is move away from a traditional model that simply looks at what was the peak from a prior period and then doubles that or something along those lines and rather look to create a more flexible platform that will enable us to serve extremely high peaks of transactions during those unique times that periodically come along. I think from a phone standpoint, it's a much more difficult capability. We've hired thousands of people into our phone service area. We tend not to do a lot of that from a promotional standpoint, promoting out publicly what we're doing, but we are hiring and have hired thousands of people.
Nevertheless, realistically, it is not possible for any firm to have a phone service live capacity that can withstand volumes that might peak at five, 10 or even more than what you might have in a normal period. You're going to have some fluctuation in your speed to answer. Now generally, we try to have that speed to answer be under 30 seconds, and we were able to deliver that in the last three quarters in that range, and in many cases lower in the last three quarters of 2021. When you get extraordinary spikes, call volume live answer is something that is just very difficult for any firm, including ours, to be able to manage those extraordinary peaks. We do the best that we can strive for there.
We hire, we prepare, we project, but when you get things that are in extreme, you're going to get some slowdown in speed to answer. I guess I'd like to add one last thing on top of it. Despite the challenges of early 2021, when you look at virtually all the third parties that evaluate firms, we consistently come out number one in service. Now, I'm not trying to say that we should be proud of being maybe the nicest house on a block that's not so great. That's not the standard we hold ourselves to, but it's just a reality of the peak peaks that we experienced in Q1 of 2021. Thousands hired, more coming on board. We'll continue to do everything we can to deliver that great client service experience in any reasonable environment that we possibly can.
Another one for you, Walt, from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. Can you maybe share your latest thoughts on the competitive landscape and current intensity and how that might evolve as we enter, you know, a different economic cycle with potentially higher rates?
Sure. Well, in the past, I've talked about when you get higher rates, you often get a bit more competitive intensity in the market. I don't know that today I can state that because I would say that competitive intensity is awfully high right now. The global banks have clearly put a lot of attention on wealth management. As they look to diversify their business models, they are targeting more of the mass affluent markets where Schwab has historically done quite well. Of course, they would likely say that Schwab and the RIAs that we work with are doing a fairly effective job of targeting the high net worth and ultra-high net worth space where they've likely had success in the past.
I think I've been quoted as saying a number of times publicly that no competitor stays in their lanes anymore. There are no lanes. We're all in each other's competitive areas and pursuing areas where our competitors have had strengths. But it's a very competitive market. The good thing about all that, Jeff, is that that's wonderful for clients. The more competitive the environment is, the more it challenges firms like ours and others to operate in a manner that serves clients and keeps them at the forefront, to do so in a way that keeps their costs as low as they possibly can be and ensures that innovation goes on in the industry. We thrive on the competition, we respect the competition, and it is very intense right now out there in the market.
Rick, pivoting back to you, a lot of interest on the lending opportunity that you outlined. Let's start with a question from Steven Chubak at Wolfe Research. You cited a very attractive long-term opportunity. Maybe you could unpack some of the high-level assumptions, the timeline to achieving that potential and how you might see the evolving rate environment impacting client demand for some of those lending products that Schwab currently offers.
Well, the first thing I would say is, as I think about our opportunity in lending over two different phases, the first phase in the next, call it zero to three years, is perfecting the way we deliver lending to clients, digitizing the experience, adding senior bankers that will develop personal relationships with the clients and help them find their way through the lending process and make it easy on the client to do their lending here at Charles Schwab. I think those are real opportunities that will improve and create significant uptake in the number of clients that are doing their lending with us. That's number one.
Over the five-year timeframe, I'd say we have additional opportunities to think about our lending products, so we'll be evaluating what lending products we have today and what lending products make sense five years from now. I will say whatever lending products we consider, we'll do it within the framework of how we've always thought about it here at Schwab, which is our risk-conscious approach. We benefit from being able to see the client's assets, from having the client's assets here, and any lending strategy will continue to use that as its backdrop. In terms of the rate environment, you know, it's hard to predict.
Certainly, if rates rise consistently over the coming years, it's likely we don't have quite the same lending opportunity that we would've in the environment we were just coming from. Whatever the lending environment is, we wanna be ready, and we know we have an opportunity to do more for our clients. The more we can do for clients on the lending side, the deeper and stickier relationships we build and the more simplicity we bring to the client's financial life. Being able to have both their assets and liabilities here is a big win for the client and a win for us. It's something that we really are gonna do regardless of the interest rate environment.
At some point, the interest rate environment will be in the favor of lending, and we'll be ready for it with easy-to-use experiences and at some point, new lending products that help our clients.
Thank you, Rick. A follow on there, and again, you might not be able to go much deeper at this time, but from Craig Siegenthaler at Bank of America, you did reference you know, potentially considering other offers on the lending side for both retail and RIA clients. Are there any types of products or design targets of those products that you might think could be interesting or could help further evolve the offering?
I think it's too early to share what those are now. You know, as that evolves and as we get, you know, more thoughts on that, we'll certainly share it, but I think it's a little bit early, other than to say they're products our clients would want, products our clients are asking for, and products that we can deliver while still taking our risk-conscious approach to lending.
Jeff, just something quickly to maybe place everyone's thoughts around lending and pricing.
Rick previously shared how only about 5% of our balance sheet is in lending products today, which means that 95% is invested in securities. Again, for those of you who follow the company closely, you know that the vast majority of those securities are in U.S. Treasuries or government-backed paper. What that means is that in order to improve our economics, the threshold is relatively low to generate a higher spread to securities via lending. We can do so with pricing that is quite attractive for our clients and yet incrementally provides economics for the firm.
That is one area that I know some folks have talked about with me in the past, and there is a lot of interest in, but I would not short shrift the opportunity for us to deliver great value for clients in lending and improve our economics, because of our low threshold for spread to securities.
Walt, maybe coming back to a bigger picture topic here, from Craig Siegenthaler at Bank of America. Schwab has been perhaps relatively more active on the M&A front over the last couple of years. You know, given those moves plus the strong organic growth the firm has been delivering, how do you think about inorganic opportunities as they slot into the to the near-term, longer-term future of the firm?
Well, our focus right now is on the integration with Ameritrade, and I think that warrants our complete attention at this point. We're delivering on that, whether it's on the expense side as has been referenced, or as we've shared prior on the revenue side with incremental revenue above and beyond what we expected. But we will also be consistently keeping our eyes open for M&A opportunities that make sense. As I've shared again in the past, for many years, it starts with our clients. If there are opportunities that make sense and put us in a position to better serve our clients through clients' eyes, that's the first threshold. We'll look at that.
If it meets that criteria, we'll begin to look more closely at whether it makes economic sense for our stockholders and can position the company in a more favorable way going forward. We look at everything, we consider everything, but we do have a fairly high criteria for transactions. I think that has paid off well, given that philosophy over the years. No real change there. We're certainly aware and we're looking at any opportunity that comes along.
Rick, pivoting back to lending, a question from Brian Bedell at Deutsche Bank. I think in the past, we've talked about some of the opportunities that we've seen as we bring together Ameritrade and Schwab, one of those being on the lending side. You know, how are your thoughts about the opportunity to further increase utilization of lending products on that we'll call it green client base?
Yeah. I'd even broaden that question to say we have a tremendous opportunity with Ameritrade or Schwab green clients on multiple fronts. Lending is clearly one, so is wealth management, and so is asset management. All three of those areas are areas where Schwab has strength and where at Ameritrade, they haven't had the access to those products. I think there's a great opportunity as we bring the Schwab green Ameritrade clients into our system to offer those things to clients, and I think they'll find great value there. You know, one of the things we often hear is that Ameritrade's clients are trading-oriented and, well, maybe they won't want wealth management or want lending.
I think we feel fairly confident that while Ameritrade clients do come to Ameritrade to trade, they also have a broader financial picture and are working with other institutions. If you go back in our history, maybe 15, 20 years ago, when we started down the path of having terrific wealth management capabilities and growing that at Schwab, people used to say the same thing about Schwab. Oh, their clients will never want, you know, full service advice. Those are trading or self-directed clients. Of course, now 18% of our retail clients value and use that wealth management capabilities. I think we'll find many of the same things at Ameritrade over time.
It will take time, but I do think bringing our lending capabilities, our wealth management capabilities, and our asset management capabilities to the Ameritrade clients is gonna be a real win for them because they'll get great value. They'll be able to consolidate relationships with Schwab, and obviously it'll be good for us to grow our business. I think there's tremendous opportunity with our Ameritrade clients.
Great. One last quick question. Rick, I think maybe I'll have you start with this. In the past, the team has talked about continuing to collect revenue for the services we provide third-party managers that access our platform. Can you provide any update on those efforts and anything and how the community should think about the evolution of that progress on that front?
Yeah. I'd say the big theme I would pass along is that we're really trying to differentiate between those firms that are great partners to us and our clients from those that maybe are not so good partners to us or our clients. You know, the T. Rowe Price relationship is a great example of working more closely with a partner that is a great partner, that's great for our clients and great partner to us as well. We have other asset managers that are also terrific partners. We've also, you know, raised our transaction fees on certain asset managers that do not pay us for the important work that we do on behalf of our shared clients.
We really are trying to differentiate between our great firms doing so many great things for our clients and being a good partner to us, recognizing that we incur a lot of time and expense on behalf of meeting our joint clients' needs and those that have been more challenging. That's been our strategy. It's working, and we're seeing a lot of benefits from pursuing that path, and expect even more to come with relationships like the one we described today with T. Rowe.
Great. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. We will now be passing the baton to Ms. Neesha Hathi to talk about our Digital Services.
Excellent. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks, everybody. I'm excited to be here today. Again, I wish I was in person with all of you. For those of you who I haven't met, my name is Neesha Hathi, and I am our Chief Digital Officer here at Schwab. I lead an enterprise called Digital Services. I'm excited to be here to talk about the progress that we've been making on our digital transformation and also give you a sense of what's coming in 2022 and beyond. I'm gonna focus on three areas today. First, I'm gonna talk about the progress that we've been making on both the retail and the RIA front with regards to digital and how that foundation is serving us really well as we've been absorbing the tremendous growth that Walt and Rick talked about.
Second, I'm gonna talk about the trends that we're seeing that are impacting investors, and I wanna do that so you can get a sense of the exciting opportunities that we believe this creates for Schwab as we think about how we leverage digital and that digital plus human value proposition to differentiate. Then finally, I'm gonna share some of the top priorities we're gonna be working on in 2022 across all three of the strategic focus areas that Walt highlighted earlier, scale and efficiency, win-win monetization, as well as client segmentation. Let's dive in. As I mentioned, it's been a few years now since we set out on our digital transformation agenda. Since that time, we've really made a great deal of progress. We've made progress on the front of scale and efficiency.
We've launched a whole swath of new experiences, products and services, and those really allow us to differentiate and compete effectively to win all those new in-investors in the marketplace. We've also laid a foundation of digital capabilities, of digital talent and expertise that we really think is important to enabling us to continue to innovate as we go forward. I'm not gonna go into detail about every box on this page, but I do wanna highlight some of them to give you a sense of where we really are on our journey today. The first thing I have to start out with is the tremendous engagement that we're seeing on our digital platforms. You know, the very top left-hand corner box there, the 3.6 billion logins in retail in 2021.
It's a tremendous number, and it's up 33% year-over-year. Actually, it's up almost 200%, if you look at the pre-pandemic numbers to where we are today. Actually, if you double-clicked into that, 3.6 billion, you'd also see the tremendous growth that we're seeing in mobile. About two billion of those logins were through the mobile channel. Really amazing when you look at the type of engagement we're seeing on our platforms. Of course, some of this engagement is due to the market environment, and investors just being engaged. The other aspect that we know is driving some of this is the work that we've done to increasingly allow clients to complete actions themselves through digital channels.
Where in the past maybe they would have called into our contact center, now they're able to complete much more of those tasks online through either the website or the mobile app. These include, you know, everything from opening an account, moving money, or even more specialized tasks like taking a required minimum distribution. Those are things that they may have had to call in for much more often previously, and nowadays are performing online. Actually, speaking of account opens, if you go to that second box, in 2021, we saw 90% of our retail accounts open digitally, and you just heard we opened quite a lot of accounts.
The importance of this from a client experience perspective, but also from a scale perspective to allow us to absorb all those new clients, is really important. The other thing I'd point out here is that we're really seeing great movement here on the RIA side. You know, in the past, we've actually, if you think about pre-pandemic, actually less than 20% of the accounts that were opened on the RIA side were opened digitally because the workflows really weren't developed enough to enable a great experience, and RIAs hadn't really integrated some of these digital capabilities into those workflows. But with the introduction of new capabilities like our digital onboarding, expansion of e-sign, we've just seen a huge increase. We ended the year with half of our accounts on the RIA side being opened with some digital enablement.
We're really excited about this. You know, it's a really great story nowadays. As we add capabilities, advisors are quicker than ever to try them out and integrate them into their workflows. And that's gonna be a great benefit to them from an experience perspective and a great benefit to Schwab from a scale and efficiency perspective. Those scale numbers also add up quickly, and the one million plus actually refers to our retail side again. That's actually the number of transactional calls we saved clients from making into our retail contact centers in 2021 just from those self-service enhancements that I mentioned. When you talk about the volumes of clients and engagement we're seeing, these numbers add up very quickly. We're gonna continue to be focusing here.
Clearly, these are capabilities that we're fortunate that we began developing several years ago and really have sharpened and made only better over the last couple of years. If you flip down to the bottom side of this chart, we're also seeing a lot of growth in the use of our digital capabilities that are more differentiated, oriented around segments, around growth. 62,000 digital financial plans were completed in 2021. As a reminder, this is someone going into schwab.com and actually completing a financial plan just on their own without a financial consultant or any human expertise. Even without any human expertise, we see elevated NNA, elevated advice enrollment from an investor when they complete a financial plan.
It's just a great value proposition for an investor to get a robust financial plan for free as a part of our Schwab platform. We see great progress and interest in our Stock Slices offer. Rick referred to this earlier. We actually launched our Schwab Starter Kit recently, and that's really focused on new investors. Schwab Intelligent Portfolios had an incredible year in 2021. We saw nearly $12 billion of inflows into Schwab Intelligent Portfolios. That offer now is about $70 billion in total assets. Before I leave this page, I wanna spend a moment on the bottom right-hand corner. This is a little bit of a peek inside the house.
One of the things that when we started out our digital journey, we really wanted to focus on how do we figure out how much friction is in this process that we have, that we lay out for clients, whether it's in moving money, opening an account, any sort of transactional experience. Part of our leaning into ease that Rick talked about was really to try to measure this in a more tangible way. When we first launched this, we were seeing these client easy scores. They were solid, you know, 70s, 80s, sometimes hitting a 90. Nowadays, we see a 95% client easy score across our digital experiences, and that includes when we launch a brand-new experience to the marketplace.
The reason I point that out is not only because it means that our clients today are having a great digital experience much more often than they were just a few years ago, but also it gives us a lot of confidence as we launch new capabilities, new experiences, that we've really honed our design, our talent, our techniques around how we launch these experiences so that we can hit the mark right out the door. Let's move to the next slide, and let me talk a little bit about the trends that we're seeing in the marketplace and how we think this is impacting the way consumers are gonna engage with digital and our value proposition more broadly. First of all, the trend around client demographics.
We've been talking about this one for some time, but I really do think it's picking up some momentum. You heard about our 3.3 million new investors that joined our retail business in 2021. One component of that growth is an influx of first-time investors. Actually, if you look at the overall U.S. population today, about 15% of that overall population just started investing for the very first time in 2021. So there's a large group of these new investors that we're serving. On top of that, we have, you know, the trend that we've been talking about with regards to the growing share of investable assets that women and other relatively underrepresented groups in the past have controlled. Of course, the big wealth transfer that we see to Gen X and Millennials.
You know, there's a related trend that we're tracking, which is this change in consumer values and preferences, the middle column on this chart. You know, the demographics changing is also, we believe, changing the way that investors want to invest. Rick touched on some of this, but we see many more investors interested in aligning their money with their values, their beliefs, and their preferences. That means sometimes values-oriented investing such as ESG. This demand especially comes from younger generations of investors, but also female investors who, when you survey them, they'll say they're significantly more likely to say that social impact is extremely important in their investing choices. We're of course seeing an interest in digital currencies from our clients.
Actually, our Q4 sentiment tracker, over 20% of our existing Schwab clients told us they had recently invested in crypto. Of course, more broadly, we see this opportunity with this particular, you know, these particular trends to continue to set a high bar in the industry on transparency and value. These are values that are really important for this generation of investors and something that we think is a strength of Schwab's that we have to continue to reinforce and build on. The third column here is really around what we're seeing across the spectrum with regards to this demand for simplification, personalization, and really a desire to consolidate one's financial life.
I think when I used to look at this data, you know, several years ago, we used to see this demand a little bit more from emerging or smaller investors. Nowadays, up and down the spectrum, you see this demand of wanting to simplify, bring things together. As you heard, you know, we believe that this is a real area of strength for Schwab and an opportunity. We have strength in investing, asset management, and banking, and we're really well positioned to bring experiences to market that, you know, are able to meet the needs of this group of clients.
Really when you reflect on this consumer backdrop, it gives us a lot of confidence that these capabilities that we've built around digital, the digital plus human integration that we're focused on, and the scale that we have is really not only gonna help us serve these investors, but actually help us serve them at scale so we can serve investors of all shapes and sizes as we go forward. Let's talk a little bit about the specific priorities that we're focused on in 2022, and I'm gonna do an overview on this slide, and then on the following, I'm gonna dive a little bit more deeply into a few different areas.
First, as I mentioned, we're really focused the, we've focused the portfolio on all three of those strategic pillars, scale and efficiency, win-win monetization, as well as client segmentation. In the area of scale and efficiency, as you can imagine, the TDA integration and advancing that is the top priority, and I'm gonna dive into that on the next slide. We're also focused on continuing to enhance self-service capabilities, those capabilities that drove all that efficiency that you saw on the previous slide, as well as focusing on augmenting and scaling our human talent. This is something we haven't talked as much about, but we have a real opportunity to leverage our data capabilities, machine learning, some of our digital capabilities to integrate the human and digital channel more seamlessly.
This allows us to scale our human professionals, but also deliver a better personalized experience via digital. Another area of focus that we have in 2022 around win-win monetization. Rick talked a bit about this already. Focus is on advancing our wealth management experiences. You know, on the retail side, if you look at our, for example, our managed investing solutions, aside from Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, many of them are actually quite traditional in their design. What I mean by that is they're human-led, they're paper-based, they're kind of traditional. One of the areas that we're focused on is actually integrating a lot more digital capabilities. Think about enrollment, dashboard, servicing, ways to interact with your portfolio through digital that really we believe is gonna differentiate those managed investing solutions and make them even more compelling.
On the advisor side, we have an opportunity to combine our integration of iRebal and Model Market Center, two of the great assets from Ameritrade, with our robust asset management capabilities on the Schwab side. We think pulling these together is really going to deliver a great, robust platform to help advisors with the investment management part of their process. We talked a bit about lending already. Our modern borrower experience, which is the initiative that we have in 2022, and the focus in 2022 is really gonna be around that pledged asset line that Rick talked about, really focused on it, really a front to back redesign that will deliver a significant experience enhancement, as well as the scale to be able to drive volume of that offer as well.
Then finally, we're gonna introduce some personalized investing solutions, and I'm gonna dive into those in just a moment. Before I go there, though, I wanna touch on client segmentation because there's a lot of work going on in client segmentation as well, enhancements to our trading experiences. We really do serve a great number of traders, so that's not only thinkorswim, but also the trading experiences on schwab.com and mobile, and also extends to the RIA side of the house, thinkpipes and iRebal are priorities. Of course, leveraging more of our digital and data to customize our solutions to those various segments of clients that you've already heard about. Let me go into a few spotlights quickly before I go into Q&A. If we go to the next slide.
Advancing the Ameritrade integration, as Walt already stated, this is our top priority, and we have a lot of work underway in order to create a really streamlined conversion experience for our clients. Some of the highlights of this is a personalized onboarding experience that allows us to welcome and transition all of those Ameritrade clients onto our Schwab platforms. This includes tailoring the experience for segments of clients such as Active Trader. We're refreshing our client summary experience so that clients are able to kind of understand the Schwab properties and take action. Also integrating new features and functionalities, as I mentioned, our trading experiences as well as improvements to things like navigation and search to make it even easier for our Ameritrade clients to understand and get using our Schwab properties.
On the RIA side, the top right-hand corner here, as we've talked about before, we're talking about delivering best of both experiences, and that is clearly what we're focused on. Digital onboarding experience is a core part of that, and that's what drives all of that efficiency that I mentioned earlier, for the advisor or the end client as well as for Schwab. Integration of iRebal and thinkpipes. We're also making a lot of progress on integrations with third parties. We have a footprint of third-party vendors that we work with, and we have over 180 product integrations today. We'll continue to build on that. We have some very targeted work to bring some of the most popular capabilities from Veo One platform into Schwab Advisor Center.
That includes new dashboards and navigational improvements. Let's go to the bottom side of this slide. Thematic investing. Thematic investing is an opportunity that we've talked about in the past. We think this is a really powerful experience for investors that we'll be rolling out in the coming months. It leverages the capabilities we purchased from Motif Investing, and it'll enable investors to access new investing ideas. It'll leverage our AI-powered research platform and tee up themes of ideas that investors can trade and act on. We'll be rolling this out over time in 2022. Finally, our direct indexing solutions. This is for both retail and RIA clients. The new solution is called Schwab Personalized Indexing.
It's a separately managed account, and it's designed to provide clients with a transparent tax-optimized experience. For those of you who aren't as familiar with direct indexing works, let me just spend a quick moment on this. The way this works is Schwab's portfolio management team, they leverage their expertise to invest each individual client account into a set of stocks that align with the well-known market index. They then leverage their sophisticated platform to maintain consistent exposure to the index. As they do this, they're also identifying and capturing tax loss harvesting opportunities every day.
The result is you have an investing experience that is aligned with an index but is tax optimized and customizable for any individual client. As you may have noticed, we, given that we had an ADV filing late last year, we're already an employee pilot, and we're really excited about the results that we're seeing from an after-tax performance perspective. This volatile market certainly gives us lots of opportunity to see that work in action. We'll be talking a lot more about Schwab Personalized Indexing in the coming months. I'm gonna turn to Q&A here, but before I do, I just wanna reinforce a few quick points.
First, we've made significant progress on the transformation, and the work that we're doing is not only delivering value for our clients today, but it's also gonna help us attract new clients and scale our business to support all of those new clients in a compelling way. Second, when we look at the consumer trends that we see accelerating, they reinforce the strength of our competitive position and the real power of our digital plus human value proposition. And then finally, while our top digital priority is certainly focused on scale and efficiency and successfully completing the Ameritrade integration, we do have tremendous opportunities to leverage digital to drive growth through win-win monetization and segmentation. And you can see that our 2022 portfolio reflects that broad opportunity. With that, I'm gonna stop there. Jeff, I think I'm gonna hand it back to you for Q&A.
Yes. Thank you so much, Neesha. Let's start off with a bit of a broader digitally focused question from Craig Siegenthaler at Bank of America. I know you touched on this a little bit already, but perhaps you could extend your observations on what you're seeing in terms of new client utilization or demand for digital experiences and digital solutions and how that mix has evolved over the last, you know, three to five years.
Sure. Yeah. As I mentioned, I mean, the digital engagement has been really tremendous. The legacy Schwab platforms as well as the Ameritrade platforms have both seen an increase in digital engagement over the last year. I think on the Ameritrade platforms, one of the observations we had is they had a slightly higher mobile engagement ratio than we did on the legacy Schwab side. That delta is actually shrinking as we go forward. As I mentioned, mobile is a significant area of growth. We have over, I think it's almost 8.7 million, unique retail mobile users at this point. That's a real area of opportunity.
As you think about, you know, integrating into a client's financial life, mobile provides us a lot of opportunity to be there when the client wants us to. You know, the other thing I would point out from a digital engagement aspect is that we're seeing engagement in lots of different parts of the offer. For example, digital account open, for example, on the mobile app, there used to be very little in terms of account open on the mobile app. You would typically go into a website if you were going to open an account. Nowadays, we see a lot of engagement on the mobile app. Trading, of course, has been at an increased level of engagement. The other thing I mentioned, some of the work we're doing in specialized segments around digital engagement.
You know, one of the old things that we used to say years ago is that, well, this younger generation who really wants digital, but not necessarily everybody, where clearly we've gotten past that story, and there's, you know, digital usage across the spectrum in terms of demographics. But some of the capabilities that we've been launching around, specialized experiences, so the required minimum distribution, or when someone passes away and you're going through the beneficiary and the heir inheritance, experience, those are really getting a lot of engagement. Actually, it's an opportunity for us to, of course, increase scale, but also make it just easier, you know, make it easier for a client to go through a pretty difficult period of their lives, and just kind of simplify this part of their journey.
We really are seeing kind of engagement across the board, but I would say mobile is a particular hotspot.
Maybe staying on the broader theme, a question from Rich Repetto at Piper Sandler. It seems like some of the newer to category brokers and other fintech companies in the space have been ramping up investment in their person-to-person customer service capabilities, while Schwab has been continuing to advance on the tech and digital side. A. Does he have that right? Could you perhaps provide some, you know, perspective on how Schwab looks to find the right balance between people and technology as it meets clients?
Yeah. I think, you know, one of the things that I believe, you know, this is not something you hear necessarily from chief digital officers, but I truly believe that, you know, the people plus technology value proposition is the winning one in this space. That's been the core of Schwab's value proposition for many years, even before digital was, you know, a big thing. It's always very technology-driven as well as human-centric. A lot of these other firms, I think, are building out something that they felt they were lacking because, when investors, during times of volatility, when they wanna get access to more services, they often wanna talk to somebody.
You know, the continued focus that we have on both digital and human channels, where we are investing in both, you heard some of those numbers that were referenced earlier. We are investing in both. Given the size and scale of our business, the investment in digital, we believe, is really going to be a foundation. Often, I think about it as we have these incredible human professionals, talent that really can help serve a client their higher value need, ask the question behind the question. What we can do in digital is really create a great foundation for them. When they can free up their capacity and focus on those higher-level engagement opportunities and the transactional can be absorbed by digital.
The other thing I mentioned, that augmentation of human talent with data and insights, I think that's a real opportunity that we have as well, which is continuing to give our professionals more insights through digital and data specifically, so that they can be even more impactful with their clients. We have really, I think, a great opportunity here. I don't think it's an either/or. I think we're investing in both, and I think they're both going to be important in the long run.
Neesha, obviously digital transformation has been a hot topic in the industry, for some time. How do you believe that Schwab is differentiated, compared to the competitive set? Do you see any natural points of evolution for Schwab as the competition in this digital space continues?
Yeah, it certainly is competitive. I think one of the things we see is that, you know, some of the marketplace is more probably vocal about some of their digital opportunities and their digital successes than we tend to be, just from a style perspective. We, you know, we have, I think made tremendous progress in both the part of the digital transformation that our clients see, but also in the part that they don't see as much. What I mean by that is that when we started on this journey, we were focused on not just, you know, for example, improving the quality and the intuitiveness of our websites and our mobile apps.
We wanted to do that, of course, but part of what we also wanted to do was do a front-to-back re-engineering so that, for example, if a client chooses to open a new account online, that we don't have a lot of paper or manual processing across the back that actually could slow down that account open or create inefficiencies for either the client or Schwab. That front-to-back part of the transformation that isn't quite as visible necessarily to our clients is something that we've also been focused on.
I think at the end of the day, as we kind of emerge out of the Ameritrade integration and into the future, I think this work that we're doing that's front to back is gonna be incredibly important because it allows you to scale at a level that I think if we had just focused on the front end of the experience, we probably wouldn't be able to. It is a balance that we strike and we strive to strike it every day, of how much emphasis do we put on that, on that front to back versus the front of the experience. That said, I'm very proud of that client easy score that I mentioned on one of those slides. I think that the team, the talent that we've developed is really focused on exceptional client experience.
We also focus a lot on the transparency of that experience, so, you know, making sure it's really obvious what we're doing, helping clients build confidence as they're going through the process, making sure that, you know, they can feel, they can continue to build that trust with Schwab as they go through the digital experience. Because oftentimes they may not be talking to somebody at Schwab that day, and we want them to walk away from that digital experience feeling really great about Schwab and the level of trust that they have with our company. That often comes through in the design of the experience, the transparency of the experience, and the simplicity of that experience.
Next question comes from Brian Bedell at Deutsche Bank. Double clicking in on thematic versus direct indexing solutions that you mentioned. Should they think of thematic as more self-directed with direct indexing being more of an advised product? Or can both services, you know, kind of land in both of those zones? Perhaps as you talk about the direct indexing piece, could you provide a little color about how we landed on the current minimum investment that you referenced?
Sure. Yeah. I think you hit it on the head. The thematic investing is more targeted towards self-directed investors. Given the, you know, the broad swath of self-directed investors and traders that we already serve today and that we know are attracted to Schwab, we think thematic investing is gonna be a great way for an investor who's interested and has ideas about what they want to invest in to actually act on those in a much more seamless way.
Thematic investing, when you think about the AI-powered research, what's really amazing about it from my perspective is that, you know, it used to be that you might search a lot of different websites and talk to a lot of different people to figure out how would I invest in, you know, electric vehicles or cancer research or some of these themes. Instead, our algorithms actually do that research, and we present the list of stocks to the investor. As I mentioned, we're gonna make it easy for them to act on those. It's a really self-directed experience. When you look, on the other hand, at Schwab Personalized Indexing, it really, it's a managed account solution. It's a separately managed account. Our professionals are managing that portfolio.
They are using their expertise, their tooling to do that tax loss harvesting to create that additional value versus a traditional index. It really is much more of a managed solution. With regards to the minimum, when we thought about Schwab Personalized Indexing and the value that it creates from a tax optimization perspective, we felt like it would be really meaningful once a client got to a certain threshold. The $100,000 minimum that's in the ADV was because of that belief. There's nothing to say that we couldn't reduce that minimum. We certainly could.
Given our desire to be able to launch this to both retail as well as RIA clients and the meaningful tax benefits that you know a higher net worth individual can get from a solution like this, that's where we focus. I think you know one of the things we pride ourselves on is we wanna get this into market and then learn from our clients. If we see that there's demand to take this and lower the minimum and make it even more accessible for other types of clients, we're certainly excited to do so.
Perhaps one last quick question here, Neesha, from Steven Chubak at Wolfe Research. Are there any other revenue growth opportunities that are driven out of the digital organization that you can provide some color around, whether that be in support of the RIA business or perhaps some newer markets such as cryptocurrencies, et cetera?
Yeah. I would say the digital organization from that perspective is often the enabler of some of those other capabilities that we talked about today. I'll use asset management as an example. One of the things that we're focused on that I mentioned is the integration of iRebal and Model Market Center from TD Ameritrade with our Schwab asset management capabilities. Integrating those creates a win-win monetization opportunity, but it's the integration of pulling all that together, the technology and the asset management, and designing it in a way that we believe will be compelling for an RIA to actually use that as their investment management platform. That's an example of the type of revenue opportunity that we're focused on in digital. Pledged asset line I mentioned is another one.
We believe that a lot of times our investors don't actually know as much about what we offer when it comes to our lending solutions. Integrating, thinking about how we design those solutions, making them simple, making them relevant, and bringing them to light at the right moment in a client's journey is another opportunity for digital to be a part of that revenue building opportunity for Schwab.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Neesha, for your time today. Everyone will be taking a short break, and we look forward to seeing you back on the virtual stage at 9:35 A.M. Pacific. Great. Welcome back, everyone. Thank you very much for sticking with us. We continue to apologize and appreciate your patience with some of the technical issues. We are working to try to resolve those. I know they tend to keep popping up. The F5 refresh, which while perhaps not a full-time fix, seems to be helping, so continue to use that. As always, we will be posting the materials and a clean replay of the webcast at the conclusion of the event.
At a minimum, that should be available for folks to go back and revisit parts that perhaps were not as clearly audible, as you may have liked. At this time, I'd like to invite our Head of Investor Services and Marketing, Jonathan Craig, up to the stage to give us an update on the retail business.
Great. Well, thank you, Jeff, and welcome everyone back. I thought I'd use the next 20 minutes or so to provide an update on the retail business, and in particular, talk about some of the significant accomplishments in 2021, and then spend the bulk of the time on 2022 priorities. It's fair to say 2021 was not the return to normalcy that many of us may have expected or hoped for. You know, in addition to continuing to deal with the pandemic and ongoing work from home, we of course had record volumes in Q1 that, though moderated throughout the year, remained pretty elevated. I'll talk more about those volumes in a second, but before I do, I just want to level set on the retail business.
You know, over the last couple of years, this business has become one of significant size and scale. In fact, with the acquisition of TD Ameritrade, with significant organic growth and of course, market appreciation, we're now sitting at just over $3.8 trillion in assets, almost 25 million brokerage accounts, and we delivered nearly $192 billion in net new assets in 2021. Certainly a business of significant size and scale. Despite that growth, though, we stuck to a very focused business model. Every single employee in retail comes to work every day with one objective, which is to help individual investors or traders achieve financial outcomes, great financial outcomes. It's really as simple as that.
You know, of course, we do that by bringing together a broad set of capabilities for those investors from a deep set of advisory solutions to trading platforms to asset management, banking and planning, and much more. Provide that to all clients, and then of course we deliver unique capabilities to some of the unique segments as outlined at the bottom of this page. You know, it really is a scale business. I'll tell you know, one of the great benefits of my role is I get to talk to clients. I talk to clients every day.
Many days, I'll go from talking to a young adult who might be setting up their first account with a starter kit or fractional trading or maybe Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, and then the next conversation will be with a multimillionaire who's got complex needs across asset management, wealth management, and lending. It really is, it's just great to see how Schwab can support both of those and go from one conversation to the next seamlessly. Let me talk about volumes for a second. In 2021, we saw incredible results and incredible client engagement. I talked about the near $192 billion in net new assets. We acquired 3.3 million new retail households, and we processed 5.5 million daily average trades. These are all meaningful increases over 2020.
They're all records, but they're also multiples of what we delivered in 2019. In fact, NNA was more than 2x household growth more than 3x, and DAC growth more than 4x. So pretty astounding numbers. Also, we continue to be recognized as an industry leader with recognitions from folks like J.D. Power, stockbrokers.com, and Investor's Business Daily. In addition to delivering incredible volume or managing those volumes, we also made significant investments in the retail business in 2021. You know, recall our strategy between now and client conversion is to go to market with two retail offers, the Schwab offer and the Ameritrade offer. Given that, our focus in 2021 was to make meaningful investments in the Schwab retail offer because that will be our long-term offer.
At the same time, make surgical investments in the Ameritrade offer to ensure it, and we remain competitive up to client conversion. Let me share a couple highlights of both. On the Schwab side, we made significant investments in expanding our dedicated relationship models. That included hiring hundreds more financial consultants and wealth consultants, allowing us to assign well over 100,000 more households to a dedicated relationship. We also launched a new mass affluent financial consultant model, which I can talk more about. We made enhancements to our managed investing solutions, including significant scale and capacity, investments in Schwab Private Client, our marquee wealth management solution. We see a lot of demand for that and invested a lot of capacity in 2021 to support that demand.
We launched Wasmer Schroeder in early 2021 to support our clients' fixed income needs, and we continue to invest in planning, which is so important to the retail offer. We also made significant investments in our banking offer, including enhancing our Investor Advantage Pricing, which has been a very powerful tool for delivering great value to our clients who have assets at Schwab but also wanna do their lending with Schwab. We launched a new senior banker role to support our high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients. Beyond that, we made meaningful investments in service and digital, a lot of which Neesha just talked about, all aimed at being easier to do business with. A couple examples, we redesigned some of our most trafficked web and mobile properties to ensure that ease.
Finally, consistent with our 50-year history of breaking down barriers and making it easy for individual investors to get started investing, we continued to invest there and most recently just launched the Schwab Starter Kit, which is really all about helping individuals, first-time investors, get started investing on the right foot. Those are just a couple examples on the Schwab side. On the Ameritrade side, though, we also made significant investments. We extended the Schwab Satisfaction Guarantee to Ameritrade. We assigned almost all one million+ clients on the Ameritrade side to a dedicated relationship. We made meaningful investments in service, including bringing the average speed to answer on the Ameritrade side down 38%. We removed some or reduced and removed some transaction pricing and removed some fees on the Ameritrade side. We developed a referral program to Schwab.
Finally, we expanded our commitment to competitively match any cash offer that we do on the Schwab side to Ameritrade as well. I know that was a long list, but suffice to say, in 2021, we did make both meaningful investments in the Schwab retail offer, as well as I said, surgical investments on the Ameritrade side. In 2021, we also made meaningful progress towards integrating the businesses, towards delivering synergies, and preparing for client conversion. Just a couple quick examples. We completed the closure of over 200 branches, bringing us to our go-forward branch model of 400, roughly 400. We were also the first, we think, in the industry to get those 400 branches open, all open post-pandemic.
We started that process in Q2, consistent with our dual mandate, which is we need to be there for our clients while we keep our employees safe. We also fully integrated all of our sales and service teams this year. What I mean by that is we harmonized roles, we harmonized supervision, coaching, training, professional development, and even compensation where we could. Finally, we delivered meaningful synergies, including already nearly well over $100 million in marketing, just as one example. With that backdrop on 2021, let me transition to some of the priorities for 2022. At the highest level, we will continue to support all of what Walt and Rick talked about, the corporate priorities of win-win monetization, segmentation, and scale. I wanna touch on five specific things. First, the investments we will make in expanding dedicated relationships.
That's a critical priority. Second, investments we will make in managed investing. Third, some enhancements we'll bring to our lending solutions. Fourth, I'll talk about a really exciting project we're calling dual registration, which is gonna allow our Ameritrade financial consultants to talk to their clients about Schwab solutions as early as next week. Finally, I'll talk about some investments in trading. Let me start with expanding dedicated relationships, because this is a top priority for Schwab. You know why? Very simply, it works.
You need only look at the numbers on the top of the slide, but when you compare clients who have a dedicated relationship with someone at Schwab compared to those who don't, controlling for size and all other factors, we see roughly 3.4 x the NNA, 2.9 x the TOA, and a 2.4x improvement in attrition. Those are really powerful numbers. Now, given our size, expanding relationships broadly across our client base is a multi-year process and one that needs to be done, of course, in a segmented way. Segmented to reflect the differing needs of our clients, as well as, of course, the different economics to Schwab. To accommodate those different segments, we have four primary relationship models we are investing in. First, I mentioned earlier, we launched a mass affluent financial consultant model.
This is a scaled model driven out of our contact centers. We also have our traditional financial consultant model. These are generally local and in physical branches designed to serve our affluent and high net worth. For the ultra-high net worth, we launched from the ground up a new model, a wealth consultant role, and this is the primary model for those ultra-high net worth. Again, it is designed to serve the unique needs of those clients. Of course, many of those clients also have financial consultants as well. It really depends on the client need. Then finally, we have some specialized financial consultant roles. Best example being the active trader financial consultant, who is really dedicated to the unique needs of traders.
You know, one of the benefits of expanding relationships beyond the NNA and the TOA and the reduced attrition I talked about is it allows us to uncover needs that clients may have and better support those needs. A great example of that is around managed investing. Managed investing remains a critical priority for us, and to be sure, we've had great success over the years. Even with that success, as you can see on the left side of this slide, we're still only at roughly 18% asset penetration in retail in our advisory solutions. On the Schwab side and on the Ameritrade side, materially less than that, below 7%. Driving higher engagement with those solutions when it makes sense for clients is a priority.
To go after that priority, we are gonna continue to invest in our existing suite of solutions as well as launch some new ones. On the existing side, I meant Schwab, I mentioned Schwab Private Client. It is our marquee wealth management offer. There is a lot of demand. We are continuing to add service and capacity to support that demand while we enhance the offer. We're gonna continue to optimize our advisor referral network. We'll continue to drive engagement with Wasmer Schroeder. Given where rates are going, there's lots of interest in fixed income, and Wasmer Schroeder is going to be an important part of our solution going forward. Of course, we'll continue to support Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, Schwab Intelligent Portfolios Premium, Schwab Managed Portfolios, and all of our SMA solutions. That's the existing lineup.
There's also some new exciting products coming to market, and you've heard about them already, but first, Thematic. I think Thematic is gonna be a great asset-gathering opportunity for us. But I'm also excited about direct indexing. You know, direct indexing is really about personalized investing. Personalized to an individual's tax situation, their concentrated positions, their values. That's really what it's all about. What excites me about direct indexing is it really is one of the first fee-based offers that we'll bring to market that will likely have broad appeal to self-directed clients, that roughly 80% of our assets that are not in an advised offer. I say it will appeal to self-directed clients because it's not really akin to buying discretionary advice.
Really, what it is, I think from an investor standpoint is we're automating for an affluent or high net worth individual how they likely are or should be investing if a meaningful portion of their portfolio is in an index. So I'm incredibly excited about the value that we're gonna bring to the table with direct indexing for our clients, and I think ultimately, value for Schwab. Of course, our commitment to helping our clients with or delivering to our clients the advice and guidance they need goes beyond the asset side of the balance sheet and, or the asset side of their personal balance sheet, but also the liability side as well. You know, the great news is we've seen some good success. Rick referenced a lot of these numbers.
We've seen significant growth in retail lending, both on the mortgage and the PAL side over the last couple of years. A lot of that growth has come, as you can see, from high net worth and ultra-high net worth. You can see those CAGRs, and they're pretty impressive. That said, we still have a lot of opportunity in front of us. To capture that opportunity, we're gonna make some significant investments. First, maybe most importantly, we will continue to add service and operation staff to support that growing need and to support those clients. We've developed a rapid response answer process to make sure we are getting back to clients quickly when they have specialized lending needs or circumstances. As I've said to my team many times, we can't always say yes.
I'd like to always say yes, but we can't always say yes to the client, but we can always deliver a rapid response, and we must. We're also just more generally developing a more tailored approach to support high net worth banking and lending, including extending the number of senior bankers we have to support their unique needs. Those are just a couple of examples we are making or investments we're making to make sure that not only do we support the asset side of the client's balance sheet, but the liability side as well. Of course, a big part of bringing advice and lending solutions to our clients is not just about Schwab clients, it's about the Ameritrade clients.
I'm really excited to talk about some work we have underway to start to introduce those Ameritrade clients to Schwab advice and ultimately lending in a very meaningful way well before client conversion. In particular, we've been embarking on a project we call dual registration, which is allowing us to dual register our Ameritrade sales staff with not just Ameritrade, but also Schwab. I'm pleased to say that as of today, all the regulatory work, all the training, all the supervision is all complete. As of next week, our Ameritrade sales staff will be operating in a dual capacity. What that means is they can not only talk to their clients about Schwab solutions, but enroll them in those solutions, they can continue to support them, and they can get paid on those solutions.
It also means that if they have a client who wants to bring over assets to Schwab early and maybe wants to be a dual client, or maybe wants to bring all their assets over to Schwab early, that financial consultant at Ameritrade can still be the same financial consultant. The client gets to move early but keep the relationship. Finally, through this dual registration, we've trained all of the Ameritrade sales staff on Schwab product solutions, procedures well in advance of client conversion, which means they will be very well prepared to answer the questions that inevitably their clients are gonna have when they do convert. The final priority I'll touch on quickly is our commitment to the active trader business, which has been enduring and maybe never more important.
It's fair to say the trading business has become an even more important part of retail over the last couple of years and now represents more than a quarter of retail revenue. In 2021, we made some meaningful investments in the trader business, including consolidating the Schwab and Ameritrade Futures businesses into one business. We completed the alignment of our OTC and futures pricing, and we also relaunched IPO Access, which has been incredibly well received. As we think about priorities in 2022, I'll touch on two with trader. One is continued investments in the thinkorswim platform, and in particular around personalization and customization, which is so important to our clients. Of course, we will also continue to invest in education, which is so central to the trader value proposition.
You're gonna hear more about that in a few minutes when Lorraine joins us here. I would just close quickly by saying the retail business has achieved incredible size and scale and continues to be recognized as an industry leader. In 2021, we delivered record volumes and continued to invest in win-win monetization, segmentation, and scale. Finally, we are well underway to integrating the businesses, to delivering synergies, and preparing for a post-CD1 world where I think we will offer an unmatched set of solutions for the retail investor and trader under one Schwab brand. With that, I think I'm gonna hand it to Stacy, who leads our new client acquisition and enterprise marketing. Stacy, I'm gonna hand it to you.
Thanks, Jonathan. Hi, everyone. I'm Stacy Hammond. As Jonathan referenced, I lead our new client acquisition and enterprise marketing team. I'm gonna share a little bit over the next 10 minutes or so about our incredible new client outcomes in 2021 and put some focus on the levers that drove those outcomes, specifically, marketing. Over the last year, we've just seen absolutely incredible growth in new clients. Our success is driven by the diverse acquisition strategy that we introduced to you for the first time last year. To put the growth in perspective, in 2021, as Jonathan referenced, we acquired over three million new clients to Schwab and Ameritrade combined.
To put that in perspective, that's as if the entire population of Chicago plus a little bit, not quite as big as L.A., joined Schwab or Ameritrade and then trusted us as they grow and manage their wealth. Another point of reference that I find staggering is that this means that about six new clients joined Schwab and Ameritrade every minute of 2021. That's an incredible amount of trust that people are putting in us. We did see different trends about how Ameritrade and Schwab acquire clients. You've seen from us before that Schwab tends to have a very consistent growth rate no matter what the external environment is. Whereas Ameritrade has absolutely incredible outsize growth in periods of volatility.
We'll talk a little bit about how that shows up in terms of the profile of the client in a minute. This success was driven by three things. The first is this focused acquisition strategy, and we'll talk about those four levers in a minute. Our intense focus on analytics so that we can optimize every single dollar that we spend. Finally, of course, like most, we benefited from the tailwinds of volatility, which not only encouraged current investors to engage more proactively with their money, but also brought new people to the category to engage with in what was considered a very exciting period. Let's take a look at the profile of the types of clients that we're acquiring. Even during these record volumes, we are, we're really pleased with the profile of the types of clients that we're attracting.
Both Schwab and Ameritrade play a very complementary role in terms of the types of those clients. Some of this may sound familiar. Schwab tends to attract more affluent clients, and we heard earlier about our TOA ratio. We tend to acquire more clients who are funding via TOA, which is a signal to us that they're bringing us dollars from a competitor. About a third of our new clients are affluent, and about 50% of those new client assets came from competitive firms. Ameritrade, on the other hand, tends to attract a younger client. Schwab also attracts younger clients, but over the past three years, more than 60% of Ameritrade's new clients were under 40. They're a pipeline for the future investor.
About 70% of the new assets associated with those new clients come from cash rather than TOA, which looks more like new money to market. Finally, and probably not surprisingly, more traders join Ameritrade. About 50% of the new client base is a trader. In fact, more than 50% of new clients do place a trade within the first month. Much more engaged activity from a trading perspective. Let's talk a little bit about the strategy that got us here. I hope some of these sound familiar from last year, but I'll do a quick reminder. We have an incredibly diversified approach to how we acquire clients, which allows us to perform in any market environment. We have the four levers are marketing.
As I referenced before, the success of marketing has to do with the efficiency with which we deploy our dollars. Sales, as Jonathan referenced earlier, we tend to see more quality from the sales channel rather than volume, which is exactly what we would expect. In our physical branches and in our independent branches, we tend to see a focus on the more affluent clients and increasing the penetration, especially with independent branches in under-penetrated markets. From workplace financial solutions, which is like our 401(k) and our stock plan, we are taking action to ensure that those participants have access to the full range of solutions that Schwab can provide.
This means extending the relationship beyond why the employer chose Schwab to the rest of Schwab, so that we can meet all of the participants' financial needs. Finally, as you heard from both Neesha and Jonathan, referrals are increasingly a source of growth for us because we're delivering an absolutely exceptional client experience. At the root of growth in the number of referrals is our ability to delight clients. We also have referral programs like that with USAA. Of course, as with the acquisition, not only are we seeing a mix, a different mix in terms of the new clients that we're acquiring, we're also adding to each of these levers. It's a tailwind behind each of these levers.
With the addition of Ameritrade's trading platform, with their incredible educational content, which you'll hear about in a minute from Lorraine, and continuing to deliver an exceptional client experience. Let's double-click on marketing briefly. We have an incredibly disciplined approach to our marketing spend, which enables us to continue to both attract and deepen relationships with a very diverse client base. We have a focused target for our acquisition dollars, focusing primarily on affluent, traders, and emerging affluent. Within, especially in 2021, we had Schwab focusing primarily our dollars on the affluent, Ameritrade primarily focusing their dollars on traders. Emerging affluent was shared, and as Jonathan mentioned, with a few of the launches that we saw in 2021, including Starter Kit, this is a great audience for us.
We use a marketing mix optimization model and econometric model to efficiently choose which channels we're going to use in any given year. The increase in digital has been consistent over the past few years, and we'll talk a little bit about some of the media trends where we'll be increasing our investments in just a minute here. Finally, the key to the efficient allocation is that we continuously measure and optimize our impact. We are using analytic tools like the econometric model, like cross-channel attribution, and we're doing experimental designs so that we can learn where the next best opportunity is. Let's talk a little bit about how we optimize our strategy in 2021, and a lot of this will continue into 2022 as well.
As consumers, many of you experienced how COVID changed the way you interact with media. You're probably one of the two-thirds of the household to cut the cord and no longer subscribe to traditional cable, but rather use a streaming service. As we were no longer stuck in our cars in traffic, we listened less to radio and more to podcasts. Our digital media consumption increased at the expense of print newspapers. Finally, as we all sought a desire to be more connected than ever since we couldn't see each other in person, time spent on social media platforms increased by 33%. Knowing all of this, we adjusted our media strategy to meet consumers where they are, to meet the new mix of consumer behavior.
What that means is a decrease in linear TV spend, an increase in streaming spend, an increase in podcast spend, of course, a decrease in print newspaper and outdoor. We're finding outdoor an increasingly relevant way to reach people. Then finally, one of the things we're excited about for 2022 is a trial in the gaming category. You might be wondering how that fits in with the target demographics that I shared earlier. About 75% of Americans game, and that could be Candy Crush on your phone. It could be The New York Times crossword on your phone. It could be a video game.
This is a way in which consumers are highly engaged, and we'd like to find a very relevant way to be where consumers are. In summary, I feel great about the sustained growth that we have seen, and in particular about the attractive profile of the clients with the complementary new clients coming from Ameritrade. Ameritrade's value proposition is complementary to our diversified acquisition strategy, and the team is incredibly committed to continuing to optimize those levers, learning every day using our analytics and our marketing technology to get even more for every dollar that we spend. Both Jonathan and I referenced several times, teased you several times, that we'll be doing a double-click on some of the educational content. I'm gonna turn things over to Lorraine to share a little bit about our educational content and trading.
Thank you, Stacy. Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, depending on where you are. Super happy to be here today to kind of share some insights into our investor education offering at Schwab and Ameritrade. To start, I kind of wanted to give and highlight overview of how we see education playing a role in empowering investors and particularly traders, across their client life cycle and their journey with us. In our acquisition model, we really see education as core to our overall value prop, especially for self-directed investors and traders. By that, I mean that we give them opportunities to kind of learn how we're going to handhold them through the different stages of their relationship with us.
Really going out there to market and making sure they see us as a trusted source for information, as somebody who's gonna support them with information throughout their relationship with us as a firm. Secondly, in terms of how we use education and onboarding, when you embark in a new relationship with a firm, you want to have the easiest, kind of journey to learn more about what they offer and interact with them.
We see education play a core part of that interaction as we can help them through learning new platforms, new products, new services, and really surfacing things based on what their investing goals are, seeing through the client's eyes, which you've heard multiple times today, but really investing time when we're onboarding an investor, in learning what exactly they're trying to achieve and making that easier by supporting them with information in various ways, which I'll talk about a little bit later. Finally, we see that education is something that is engaged with across the spectrum, so it's not a need that's one and done. People need support in terms of information across their journey with the firm. We see even our most tenured clients use education at different stages in their interaction.
One thing we've really tried to do, and Neesha touched on this earlier, is anticipate the needs of our different segments and our client base, whether that's being there for them in the moment when things are changing in the market, or when new products come to market, or when we launch something new, really making that transition to them something that's easy and that we can do at scale through these targeted education offerings. Finally, retention. I think sometimes people perceive education as, you know, something you do at the start of a journey. Really what we see is the part of investing, it's a lifelong journey.
For us, it's extremely important to be a credible source of information across their relationship with us and be there again when they need us with information and perspective, and content that really empowers them and helps them achieve their investing goals, whatever those they may be. We all kind of heard so far of 2021 was kind of a record year in many ways, and really what we saw was no different with education. We saw people engage with education as they entered into the marketplace, whether that was for the first time or maybe they were trying out new products or services.
Really what we saw was kind of a really good kind of signal that when our engagement in new accounts grew or, you know, our trading volume increased, clients spent time investing in learning about what they were doing. Whether that was adopting a new platform, taking up a new product, maybe trading for the first time, they really spent time on learning how to do that so that they felt empowered and they had confidence when they were engaging with the marketplace, and with us as a firm. In terms of numbers, the growth that we've seen on the Ameritrade side has been really, really significant, 230% since 2009.
What we've seen is the trends in consumption of content and education engagement have very much followed along with the trends in engagement with the market, which is what we wanna see, being there when our clients need us to achieve their goals. In February of 2021, kind of our biggest month ever, was when we saw really significant engagement with the marketplace. Again, we wanna be there and make that kind of journey very easy for our clients as they try and engage with the market by giving them information that helps them achieve their goals.
On the Schwab Insights and Education, or Ideas offering, they saw 24 million engagements across all our channels in 2021, which is really significant, and again, points to the fact that clients value perspective and insights to really drive them in their journey to making decisions, whatever they may need, whether they're investors or more active traders, really being there to serve that broad audience, in different segments in different ways. In 2021, we really focused to continue to meet investors where they are.
That meant for us on our client platforms, giving them an interactive experience that's got consistency across channels, that kind of gives them a broader array of offerings, whether that's video, podcasts, articles, more in-depth interactions like courses, to really be there and give them that digital-first experience where they felt we were meeting their goals, but we could do it at scale. We also saw a trend that, you know, for people to lean on the public channels that they traditionally engage with to learn about new things. We saw real growth in our YouTube offering. We had about 80 million YouTube views in 2021 on the Ameritrade side.
That really kind of showed us that to be on the platforms where investors search for information was very, very important to build that rapport and trust, and to show that we're gonna be in those avenues by which they interact. Finally, again, in order to meet people where they are, you have to go to those venues. In terms of social media, we know people, and we all do it, pick up our phones multiple times a day, and check Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram. Again, traveling to those destinations and having a presence as a trusted voice and a recognized brand was very, very important for us. We saw really great demand across our trade in terms of our social offering in 2021 also.
One of the trends we saw, and it will be of no surprise to anybody here, was new trader content our most popular in 2021. We really saw that as clients endeavored to trade for the first time or maybe try stocks or options for the first time, they again took the time to invest in knowledge. They're trying to build up that rapport. How do I do this in a way where I feel risk-defined, I feel confident, and I know what I'm doing? Again, a lot of what we did was thinking in terms of how our clients are trying to achieve certain goals. I wanna trade a stock for the first time. We built a whole offering around how we can help enable people to take that first step.
First options trade was another area where we saw extreme interest in, like how do I get to, I have all this knowledge, the market is moving. Now, how do I actually kind of take that next step and engage 'cause I want to do that in the market? Again, our job is really to handhold and to support them through those endeavors in a very, kind of motivational and supportive way. I just wanna touch a little bit on our offering in general and kind of how we focus. Traders in particular seek out education to really support their diverse needs. We kinda see that across numerous spectrums.
From basic things like how to navigate trading platforms and trading strategies, we've really built our offering around that kind of functional goal-based things, that traders need as they engage with the marketplace. For example, how to use charts, how to understand certain strategies, particularly option strategies, futures strategies, and then really how to, take and marry those two things in terms of I understand strategy, I need to use this platform, how do I do those things? We have a solution whereby our clients can use our thinkorswim trading platform to really take that knowledge they have, the strategy, and apply that in real market conditions, but not putting their money on the line.
Paper trading really gives them that opportunity to try out what they've learned before they actually go into the real marketplace with real money, so that they learn a lot and they feel really empowered when they actually do take that next step. The other place we see traders really seek out education and investors in general is understanding new products. When something launches to market, we wanna make sure that we're there to explain, to break down the kind of risk and the opportunities that certain things allow them in the marketplace.
We spend a lot of time really anticipating those needs and getting into the mindset of the investor is like, "What do I need to know, and how can we, in really colloquial, simple language, support them through that journey?" Again, some of our most popular content this year was really focusing on those things. Like how do I go from zero to trading a stock, or how do I, you know, enhance my portfolio with options? Really making that journey easy for them by giving them that goal-based education was tremendously important and helping them understand those products and services. Finally, again, pivots to the trader audience especially, but in general, investors really want to kind of get some guidance and perspective in how we react to market events.
Whether that be, you know, earnings season or Fed announcements, et cetera, being there in that moment to really explain to investors what's happening in the marketplace and give them some ideas and insights on how they can engage has been very, very important for us as well, and that forms a very key part of our offering being there in the moment. As part of that offering, I just wanted to again highlight we lead digital first. It gives us the ability to scale, and we can kind of anticipate those broad goals and experience levels that clients have, and really present them with curated experiences where they feel like we really know what they need and we're putting that in front of them. Again, we can do that in a scalable way.
Really, it’s been very important to us to have a broad offering, but that also feels like we are anticipating those needs. A client who has a specific goal can reach that goal with the least amount of attrition possible. And then we also pair our offering, and this is particularly important for traders with online coaching. Really taking the time to offer something to clients where they can learn from an educational coach that will really take them through that kind of trifecta of now I know the strategy, I know the platform, I want to apply it in real-time in the market.
Across Schwab and Ameritrade, we've really spent a lot of time on how we can support clients through that journey, and it's really been very, very important to both us and our clients, historically and will continue to be. As we kind of look forward, a few years ago, we launched the TD Ameritrade Network, which has been essentially important for our traders, because it provides real-time market news, analysis, insights, and brings together kind of the mind share of the industry, CEOs, CFOs across different companies, really helping investors to learn and anticipate and think about how to react in real market conditions.
Again, it's a challenge for a lot of investors to kind of understand what to do when the market's doing X or Y, and really what we've tried to be there for them in that moment to give them that perspective and help them come up with ways they can react or maybe not react in terms of their holdings and portfolio. Again, it's been incredibly important for us, and in 2021 we saw 25 million views of that content. Today and this week we've been covering Intel, Tesla, Apple earnings, and I think again, being there with that perspective as a trusted voice in the industry has been incredibly powerful for us. Finally, again, just kind of wanted to highlight why clients benefit from education.
What we see is a client who you kind of offer that curated, personalized experience to in terms of you actually care and anticipate their needs are more engaged. They establish a very trusting relationship because they feel like you are there for them, always in the moment. They also tend to be more satisfied. When we see clients engage with education, they have deeper relationships with us, and they really feel like we care about what they're trying to do. It's been incredibly important for us to kind of frontline everything we do with good information and education that really surrounds that client and makes them feel like that we're really helping them along their journey with us, whatever they're trying to do. Then it just makes people more connected.
The more we can put out there in terms of how our clients interact with us that makes them feel like we're there in the moment, they just turn to us more and more. I think that's a responsibility we see, and I think it's something that's gonna prove important as we head into this future. As for what that future entails, our goal in this space is really to evolve the education experience that we have to continue to educate, engage investors at scale across the combined firms. Really in 2022 and beyond, what we're looking to do is invest in infrastructure to scale and improve the offering to our combined client base.
We're looking at all those areas where we can offer more and more support to our clients and surface the best of what Schwab has to offer and the best of Ameritrade to those clients. It's gonna be a win-win for them. We're also looking at making sure we bring the best of content from both of our brands to support clients regardless of segment. There's huge opportunities in terms of what Schwab has traditionally offered and what Ameritrade has in this space to really nurture that client across the spectrum. Finally, education is gonna play the pivotal part in and around client conversion to just ease those areas where clients can, you know, need some support. It gives us an opportunity to do that at scale.
We're really, really looking at those problems that we anticipate or those things that clients are going to perceive that they need help with, and looking at ways that we can kind of scale our offering and offer them support on a very large basis. Then finally, our goals for the future is kind of consistent with what you've heard all day, is we want to be there and we will be there for investors and traders when and how they need us, in any moment. That's really our commitment. Education is kind of part of that trifecta of service, product, platform, to really support clients across the spectrum.
With that, I believe I'm going to hand back to Jeff Edwards and invite Stacy and Jonathan back onto this virtual stage to take some Q&A.
Thanks, Lorraine. First question from Rich Repetto, Piper Sandler. This one is probably for you, Jonathan. Sensing a little more of an excited or appreciative tone around the thinkorswim platform, could you maybe touch on, you know, maybe a few of the aspects you're most excited about or some of the advantages you're most excited about that all clients will be able to take advantage of post conversion?
Thanks, Rich. I can say a couple words and certainly Lorraine, if you wanna jump in, feel free. We are one of the great benefits of the acquisition, TD Ameritrade, of course, was the strength of the trader offer, and the key parts of that offer were the thinkorswim platform and also the education that Lorraine just referenced. We have every intent of bringing both of those over, make them available to Schwab clients as well as continue to support the Ameritrade clients who are using it today. You know, Rich, we remain equally as excited, if not more excited in that platform and what it's gonna do for us. A lot of the investment is on bringing it over, but also we're making investments along the way to improve it.
I've talked about some of the personalization and customization enhancements we're making. The excitement is probably that we're just getting closer to conversion and closer to being able to introduce what is a truly, you know, marquee platform for traders to Schwab clients, and also bring the Ameritrade clients over as well. Lorraine, I don't know if you'd add anything, but.
No, I would just kind of echo. Yeah, I would echo what you said, Jonathan. Rich, I think that we definitely have a commitment to traders, and that comes across all of these different areas, you know, service, platforms, education, and that's something that we're really focusing on and making sure that we give them the best possible resulting offer post conversion. That's extremely important, and we're definitely excited.
Maybe Lorraine, you can continue here with this question from Brennan Hawken at UBS. You know, clearly, the platform has a rich data set based on the types of engagements and products and offerings that clients are taking advantage of. How does the team utilize that data to, you know, adjust the offering or tailor to make sure customers are getting what they need and the help when and where they want it?
Yeah, great question. I think, you know, it comes back to that kind of idea of really putting yourself in the client's seat and thinking and anticipating what their needs are. We spend a lot of time on data analytics to understand behaviors, client feedback, what are they looking to do. That could be in so many basic things as certain features that they wanna see or changes that they wanna see. Again, our goal is to make that journey for clients as easy as possible. As we kind of look at the interactions that clients have across our platforms, it's not just exclusive to the thinkorswim platform.
We're really trying to make that journey as easy as possible for them, always looking to enhance features or to, you know, make our charting capabilities better or to you know, as we launch new platforms, for instance, offering a very, very robust kind of content and educational support around that. So, in terms of we use analytics, client feedback, and then really just anticipate needs in terms of where the industry is going in general to kind of think about how all of those things can lead to a better outcome for our clients. So it's very, very important for us to kind of look across that holistic view to support them.
Now, Stacy, maybe a question for you here from Devin Ryan at JMP Securities. Obviously, 2021, both at Schwab and across the industry, was marked by very strong tailwinds on the client acquisition front. I guess how would you characterize or how does the team think about utilizing some of the strategies that you talked about across a range of environments or you know, as some of those winds potentially change for better or worse?
Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. The value of a consistent and diversified acquisition strategy is that it behaves like a portfolio where different levers perform better in different market environments. In a market environment with incredible volatility, marketing gets a massive tailwind. In environments where volatility is lower, we see the branch play and the sales teams play a bigger role. I think what is the most interesting heading into 2022, though, is the way in which Ameritrade complements our acquisition strategy. If Schwab has demonstrated consistent growth over time, and that's one half of the portfolio, the other half of the portfolio is Ameritrade, which during periods of volatility, much like the volatility itself, shows a huge spike in growth.
I'm confident that given any market environment, the acquisition strategy will perform and will deliver growth because it is diversified and because different layers of the portfolio respond differently to different market environments.
Jeff, I might just add. I think Stacy nailed it. I might just add at a more maybe macro level. We hear a lot about this idea of the rise of the retail investor coming on in 2020, and I think sometimes that's attributed to the pandemic and that environment. You know, I would say, I think we would say a couple things about that. Number one, the rise of the retail investor happened, started a long time ago. I think Chuck and a few others are the impetus for that. This has been going on for a long time. With respect to the volumes over the last couple of years, I think there were a couple factors. No doubt the pandemic was one.
The movement that we led to zero commissions that the industry followed removed tremendous friction in this cost friction from the category. The addition of fractional trading and that being broadly adopted across the industry makes it even easier to invest. Of course, all of the digital and mobile innovations that have happened are very real. When I think about or when we think about what, you know, what created some of that volume, I would talk about all four of those factors and many of which will endure. I'm not predicting, you know, volume's gonna continue anywhere near at the same rates. We don't. We're not in the volume prediction games. I do think the removal of the cost friction, the fractional trading, and the digital and mobile innovations will endure.
I think that it's never been easier to open an account and even get the tools and resources to be successful.
Thanks, Jonathan. Maybe turning to the advice solution piece. Question from Ken Worthington at JP Morgan. Assets in the kind of advised investment space have, you know, generally kept pace with overall retail asset growth, but perhaps, per his view, haven't necessarily outpaced. Can you talk about how you and the team are thinking about continuing to invest in the product suite and how you prioritize that across the broad spectrum of need within the retail client business?
Yes. Advisory solutions broadly are a critical component of our strategy because we see clients want and need advice in many cases. Rick says this many times. There's a bull market for advice, and we have an opportunity to deliver more of it to our clients consistent with our through client size strategy. That is our priority. That is our focus because again, we see, you know, generally speaking, clients in our advisory offers get better financial outcomes over time, and we want to support that if it makes sense for them. In terms of the numbers, we've driven a lot of net incremental growth into our advice as a percentage of the overall retail base, given the tremendous NNA that's come in in the last couple of years.
Given, you know, some of it, as we've talked about, tended to be younger, tended to be a little bit more trader-centric, maybe not surprising that the actual percentage penetration hasn't moved up as much as the question might have assumed or hoped. But we've driven meaningful numbers in terms of advice growth and lending growth. It is a priority, and it is a priority because we see within our client base a desire for it. Again, I'll also say, as I mentioned earlier, I think direct indexing is a particularly interesting opportunity for us because it's unlike the rest of our advisory solutions. It's a fee-based offer, but it's a fee-based offer around automating how you build and manage an index.
I think that's gonna have tremendous appeal for affluent high net worth and ultra-high net worth.
Jonathan, is it fair to say that your excitement level, perhaps even be characterized as growing, you know, following conversion? You talked about some of the dual registrations, some of the opportunities of bringing the two brands together and making the broad suite of advice available to a broader client base. Is that reasonable?
As you know, Jeff, I'm never short of excitement, but that is definitely another huge area, and I'm glad you, I mean, I talked about the dual registration. You know, trillions of assets on the Ameritrade side that I think may be characterized as more self-directed and trader, but they actually have a broader wallet. Some of it's out of Ameritrade, some of it's elsewhere. I have a lot of confidence over time as we bring them into the Schwab model, assign relationships, build upon the trust that they have with Ameritrade and expose them to the broad set of advisory solutions we have and ultimately lending solutions. I have a lot of confidence that is a great opportunity as well.
Client needs are pretty similar when you get down to it.
Lorraine, another education question from Devin Ryan at JMP Securities. Obviously, there's been quite a we'll say a step function in retail engagement over the past couple of years. You know, what's the team's you know belief or understanding of how retail investors you know their education level is today? Are they better informed or better educated than they were in years past to navigate shifting market dynamics or, you know, what's our perspective there?
Great question, Devin. I would definitely say that they are. I think it's due to the fact that more information is available to investors. I think it's beyond just information. I think it's that access to the market, you know, the environment and the cost environment we operate in, the availability of trading platforms that, you know, 10, 15 years ago were really restricted in terms of who had access to the market. I think all of those things have come together to really give unprecedented access to clients. In terms of education, I really think that people realize it's important to understand what you are doing, especially if you're a self-directed investor. People care about their money. They want to be risk-defined, they want to protect themselves.
I think part of that is kind of taking that time to learn about what you're trying to do, whether that's you're a stock investor, an options investor. Really, I think that what we're seeing is people do bear responsibility to learn how to do things. I think the onus is on us as a firm to put that in front of clients and to make that easier for them. That's really what we spend a lot of our time kind of thinking about from a strategic perspective, is how can we support that need so that we make that time they're gonna spend on educating themselves as easy as possible. Again, curating and personalizing those things right down to the user and to the segment is really, really important.
I think, you know, the trends that we've seen, and I highlighted this area earlier, Devin, is that, in terms of the engagements and new accounts, we saw that growth kind of pop up with education too. I think that really supports the story that, you know, investors invest in the market, but they also invest in that time to kind of acquire knowledge and build that kind of, you know, risk-defined approach to what they're trying to do. I do think that, you know, there's more information available and they're more willing to take the time to kind of absorb and take that information on board as they try to achieve their goals.
Great. Well, thank you, Jonathan, Stacy, Lorraine. Appreciate the time. Now it's time to share the stage with Mr. Bernie Clark, the Head of Advisor Services. Bernie.
Great. Thanks so much, Jeff, and I'm really excited to be here talking with all of you. Although I think next year if we continue in this COVID environment, I'm gonna lobby with Jeff and Rich to at least have cardboard cutouts of all of you as they do in the Super Bowl to make sure that we're having some kind of visual of each other. I miss being out there with you. I miss the conversations that we have actually in between the sessions, probably more so than just the delivery. As always, I'm sure your questions will be the most illuminating of this conversation, but you know, I'm here to tell you a story I've been telling you for quite a few years. It is a story of growth.
RIAs continue to win in their segment of the marketplace. The fiduciary model, the independent model, it's growing very rapidly. I'm gonna talk to you a lot about why I think that's happening, what some of the drivers of that are. We've experienced significant growth, not just with the combination with Ameritrade, but we've been winning in a big way in the marketplace. I wanna talk to you a little bit about how we're handling all of that and building the platform for the future.
You know, to me, the integration of Schwab and Ameritrade is a labor of love, but really the success is gonna come when we have something that is so much better, and leading, and is going to answer, I think, many of those competitive questions that tend to get asked by all of you and the marketplace itself. The reality is, we're building it on people and technology, a nice blend of both. We enjoy a very loyal group of individuals on both sides, that have been serving advisors for a long time. Our average tenure, even with the additions of all the new staff that we're bringing on board, really tenure within the group is still well above five years of tenure in serving advisors. It's very much a career.
I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about some of the career opportunities that we're trying to create to make sure that people wanna stay with this business, and that they feel an extension of the advisors' offices, because I think that's one of the biggest attractions. As always, I'll talk a lot about the industry in our conversation because I do still think it is somewhat underrepresented. Although I thank all of you who have taken the time to just talk about it, and to help to grow the reputation of the independent space within financial services. Let's go to the first slide as we look at it. An enormity of growth. That top four are the 17,000 firms that exist. I just wanted to remind you, I know it's a number you know.
We do business with 13,000 of those firms. That's amazing at this juncture to be representing that big population of the industry. I think the thing that makes it most significant is that I and we get to play a clearinghouse for all of the ideas and growth that comes through the industry, having a view into that large of population of clients puts us in a really unique position. We used to brag a lot about the fact that our benchmarking study talked to $1 trillion in assets. It's certainly brag-worthy, but in reality, think about the fact that we are talking and representing three-quarters or more of the industry in all the things that we're doing, and that includes some of the creative new money that's coming into the space as well.
Often, before deals are happening, we're getting a chance to talk about what those might look like in the future. If I look at the asset growth, again, significant. We're at about $3.7 trillion in assets for advisors as of today. That's a 21.5% growth rate over the prior year. That is significant even in a conversation that I've had with you for many years about significant double-digit growth. It has taken a step function in the upward direction. I think the growth is really coming because people are looking for more help. People are seeing this model as a significant benefit to them. We saw $180 billion come from advisors moving into this space, advisors who had assets but now are moving into this space.
We saw $70 billion, just this past year, come from those who are actually forming their own independent firms and joining the space. I go to sort of the third tier, which we'll talk a lot about, and that's the capital, the PE, the M&A that's happening in the space. It's creating major change within the industry, all for the positive, I would say, as well. The next slide, what I hope to do here is just again to remind you, there are several ways in which we have people participating in the acquisition space, in the aggregation space, in the platform space, and the way capital is coming into this space.
It's really important because Walt said it before. I love the way he says it, "No one's staying in their lane." Everybody is sort of coming into the space, looking for the opportunity to participate. Dollars are coming in, of course, looking for a return. In reality, they're staying longer than they had been staying. In some cases, I think the strategic acquirers are starting to morph their intent as they start to come into the space. As you look at the bubbles, you can see the size of the bubble really representing how large some of these firms have gotten. They're all names that you and I have talked about for the past many years. Big names, growing rapidly, great in reputation. Some having gone to the public markets already, not all.
Some really relatively new to the market space, but making a big splash. There were 242 transactions posted in 2021. Volume was up 52%. That's according to David DeVoe's deal book. He's been following this industry closely. As you know, David worked with us for many years as well. There's a lot of success that's happening within this space. I think one of the things that I'm happy to say, 'cause I think it was very much needed, is we were seeing an awful lot of the acquisition happening in that billion-dollar space.
We've started to see that that's leaking down a little bit more now into the $500 million-$1 billion space, which is important because we know those smaller firms are going to start to need more help scaling themselves up. We saw a 23% increase in that area. So I think good news on that front, that there's more interest as we get deeper into the size of clients as we go forward. It's an arms race. Every advisor I speak to, when they do a deal, I often get the opportunity to speak to them a little before they do the deals. But when they do a deal, they've talked to 10 or 11 providers, whether they're platform, strategic or financial buyers. They're talking to all of them. They're vetting the possibilities.
They're trying to understand their opportunity and what they're doing, and that's driving multiples up. Interestingly enough, some of the names that you see on the chart, the traditional acquirers who are certainly still winning. Some of them are actually pausing a little bit as well, because they recognize that the multiples have grown to a place that they hadn't been comfortable with before. They might be just waiting a little bit for the market to settle. In other cases, people are diving in and recognizing that now is the time, the growth is here, they wanna participate, and they wanna get involved.
From the perspective of the typical advisor operates with eight employees and has about $300 million, then you look at the size of something like a Focus Financial Partners, $300 billion and 4,000 on staff if you count all of their firms. Obviously, the magnitude of what's happening is clear. Succession is playing its major role as we suspected it would. As you know, there's still a preponderance of advisors greater than 55 years old, and their firms have taken on great value, which represents both a challenge of management, but also a challenge of valuation for those younger buyers. Sometimes the succession of the firm itself is really dependent upon finding a good home to go forward with for their clients. Let's think about the deals that have happened, right?
Focus, as I mentioned, they have over 80 partners. They did 21 deals in 2021. 21 deals. Beacon Pointe, a firm that we've been working with for probably over two decades now, did 14 deals. They have a slight shift in their M&A strategy as we saw with some of the other firms. They're starting to do some tuck-ins to those firms now too. A neat strategy to bring even some smaller firms into the safety and security of a more scalable organization. Dynasty, literally just filing for their IPO. I know many of you are tracking that one very closely.
I highlight the fact that platforms are starting to serve each other, and it's a very open space in that Mariner, who did 13 deals, has struck a deal with Dynasty Financial Partners, and they're creating Mariner Platform Solutions from that deal. People are crossing over those lanes again, working with each other. I still find it to be a rather altruistic space. Mercer working with Oak Hill Capital did nine deals. We continue to talk with them. Again, another alumni as the CEO over there of Charles Schwab in working Dave Welling, who many of you, I think, know as well. CI Financial now being referred to as a serial acquirer after the number of deals they've done. 29 deals in two years.
Some of our largest and most prestigious firms, and people who were the original originals of this industry forming together, and morphing again, and changing their business plan a little bit to entice more RIAs, forming a new partnership model that allocates shares, and allows them to participate. I think we're gonna hear more about a management team coming out of that group as well, which I think is gonna be exciting to hear about, too. They're going to make some changes. We're staying very, very close with Kurt MacAlpine and his team, as well as the many clients that we've had who have participated in that deal already. Of course, Wealth Enhancement Group has been doing this for a while now. 13 deals in 2021.
Lots of interested parties, only a few names, but over 62% of firms, RIAs now say they would like to do a deal. Still a little bit hard for me to separate the buyers from the sellers. Everybody wants to look like a buyer. There's a lot of sellers out there as well, and we're gonna do a lot of work in trying to make sure that we're introducing more of that. That's something that I think Ameritrade did extremely well, and we're gonna make sure we lean on that as well. Let's think about too really what's going to make these firms successful in the future. The needs of the end clients, they're changing. They've been evolving.
As we've talked about many times, there's many more services that have been added to advisory offerings that have little to do with the portfolio and a lot to do with people's personal lives. That will continue, I am certain. As part of that, I think banking and lending, the liability side of people's lives is becoming increasingly more important. We're gonna stay very focused on that. We have a unique opportunity being a provider with a bank to do a whole lot more, I think, on the lending side. It's very exciting, the opportunities. We saw Pledged Asset Lines up 50% this year. It is an area where we will make sure that we are focused, and that we are taking advantage of.
Because we are a trusted partner, advisors like to take the liability of the balance sheet side to us, where they know the assets are secure, and that they can do more with them. Clients are also looking for a means of trying to make sure that they can get what they want when they want it in the most expeditious way, and digitally. Neesha did a great job talking about all of the actions we're taking on the digital front. If there's one thing about this long duration of COVID that it's taught everybody, is we need to be able to deal with each other virtually. The adoption has been phenomenal. They wanna onboard their clients digitally. We're working on that. We continue to progress on our Starter product.
It's gonna be industry leading, I promise, in allowing fully digital transmissions and integrations back and forth between us, our client, the advisor, and their client, the end client, the client of Charles Schwab as well. Whoever can bring these capabilities best, I am certain, is going to win in this space. Yes, it is a lower ROCA space given there's a third party involved in it. The scale and efficiency, as you see from the original numbers that I had showed you, that we can bring to that is going to be a huge, I think, advantage for us as we go forward. Just to recap on the next slide a little bit, $315 billion in net new asset last year.
I talk with our sales team all the time, and it's just amazing to me. When I joined and started working with advisors almost two decades ago, I think we were celebrating after my first year here at getting close to $100 billion in total assets for the firm. $315 billion is like growing a firm every year. Again, that's what we expect to do this year. Zero-cost trades, low margins, you know, flow. We've seen a lot of flow in that growth because of, I think, some tax fears, a lot of business sales that have gone on. We've seen a lot of cash come in directly and then get repurposed into the market.
The Client First strategy with these world-class advisors and the depth of their relationships. They're retaining their assets, and they're growing their assets at the same time. Of course, then the advisors who are coming into the space and will, I believe, continue to come into the space. Share of wallets, as we like to call them. We always watch to see how we're doing in our share of wallet of the marketplace. Our transfer of assets ratio ended the year at over $3 coming in for every $1 that went out to our competitors. That's a high for us. Certainly something we watch closely. Certainly something we're proud of. I think our model is truly working.
If we think about the existing RA relationships on the next slide, and the driving of organic growth, 90% of that growth that I talked about on the previous page, 90% of it came in organic growth. 10% of it came from new to firm advisors breaking away. Now, part of that's a numerator denominator factor because the numbers didn't go down on the new to firm coming in. It's just the organic growth grew enormously. And advisors are having tremendous success while holding onto the assets they have. It's no wonder that the M&A is hitting such a high point. It's no wonder the valuations are getting to the points where they are. We're seeing assets under management growth across all of the segments.
The $1 billion segment may be slightly slower, but we've certainly seen an awful lot of growth as well, given the fact that as we said in our pledge, we are here for all sizes of advisors. There's still no one else in the industry who stakes out that claim. It is going to serve us well into the future, I assure you. Specifically working on some things on the next slide, to stay focused on to make sure that we're driving the success that we've had is, you know, Ameritrade built a platform to take advantage of where they could in our platform. It's an interesting strategy, and they had tremendous success with it.
Well, I'll tell you, we're taking every one of those things they had success with, and we're building it into the combined platforms now to make sure that all of those advantages stay with us and don't go away, and that we can't allow someone else to kind of sneak in the back door either. That's a fabulous opportunity we have at seeing the advisor world through their eyes, and then making sure this combined platform is even better. One and one has to equal four or five if we're gonna continue to compete because there's gonna be a lot more competition coming our way. Building the combined firm of the future and a commitment to the best of both. That goes for people, digital onboarding. iRebal is a great example of a model marketplace that had great success at Ameritrade.
We're gonna modernize it and make it great for both the green clients and the blue clients in the future. APIs, something that got written an awful lot about. We've added over 100 APIs. We've taken the best of the APIs of both worlds, and deeper API integration with our model is going to be part of the success of the future. Remember, we're a custodian. That makes this business a little different here. Creating opportunity for our clients to use all the best in the industry is part of our success model, and we'll have to continue. We will need, because every indicator points to it still being most important, to make sure that our service is best in class.
I'm happy to say after a rocky start to 2021, when volumes hit us the way they did, we have leveled off and we're providing great service and making sure that we're providing what our clients expect us to be. That brings me to the service evolution. We continue to visit how we're serving our clients, teams, centralized functions. Everybody likes to talk about the concept of call centers. There's no such thing. You dial into anybody you talk to. Everything's a call center. The reality is, are they getting to people who can serve them well? Are they getting to people who they know and that they know know what their business is doing? The answer to that is becoming increasingly more yes.
With the knowledge we've gotten from the vast number of clients coming over from Ameritrade, I talk to more Ameritrade clients today probably than I do Schwab existing clients, or at least as many. They are great conversations, and there's a lot of excitement about coming together. Diversity is going to be so critical to the future. Diversity of age, gender, ethnicity maintains a critical point of success for the future, and lots of that has to do with the talent race. Talent race is one of those things that, again, we need to be winning as a firm. Our clients need to be winning. We're very harmonized with them on what's important to continue to go forward.
As we think about sort of the final slide, just to put a wrap on this so we can get to the Q&A, we're gonna continue to work on the Ameritrade conversion. It's going very well. I will tell you our cultures are very, very similar. It's exciting to have the great talent working together. We're gonna further evolve our service and relationship models, accelerate the utilization and optimization of our digital tools along with our people, and then using talent as a differentiator, both in growing talent for the industry, but growing talent for ourselves. Of course, as we heard Rick talk about today, opportunities for us to bring buying power and our prowess to the market by bringing great partners like T. Rowe Price.
I know our clients that they've talked, they're very excited about that deal. They're very excited about other opportunities we may bring to them as well. Banking and lending, I've talked about. I think it's critical to the success of advisors. I think it's critical to our success to be a leader in that space, and we will be. Probably the most important thing on the wrap-up slide is the fact that we have to continue creating awareness in Washington with the regulators and with clients about what this model really is because it's still a little bit understated. Here's a mosaic of clients, some starting with us as far back as 1996, some joining us within the last 18 months. I can't tell you how much the Ameritrade clients have enjoyed joining our advertising campaign as well.
With that, let me bring it to a close. Went a little longer than I had planned to, but you always have some great questions, so I'd love to hear them.
Thank you, Bernie. First question from Dan Fannon at Jefferies. As you think about that exciting growth story that you spoke to, how do you see any shifts in terms of, you know, market gains? And how would you think about the, you know, current backlog of potential new advisors coming to the platform today versus, say, a year or three years ago?
Yeah. Our funnel of advisors wanting to come is quite similar in size. However, there's a difference in some of the teams that are coming now. We do see teams as opposed to individuals. We've got some exciting news that you'll be hearing about in the first two quarters of this year with some teams coming to us that we think are going to help to again revolutionize. Again, the teams that come, they're considering more and more joining a firm as opposed to even creating their own independence. We have our partners in the industry, those many platforms that we've talked about. We do a lot of work with Dynasty.
We do a lot of work with all of those firms on making sure some of these individuals who wanna come into the independent space can tuck in to existing firms or become independent firms within those platforms.
You have follow-up there. Question from Brennan Hawken at UBS. Are you seeing any shifts in the sources of new RIAs and the firms you're looking from? There appears to be a bit of a divergence in the growth rates of some of the more, you know, traditional full service firms. Just curious if you have any perspectives you can share there in terms of the sources of transition advisors.
You know, the quote unquote full service are more and more trying to emulate the model that's been created in the independent space. You've even seen a firm or two buy or acquire firms within the independent space. I'm not sure where that may lead us, but the reality is, one of the things we've seen, even with the Ameritrade acquisition, is a better look inside the independent broker-dealer model. A model that has long tried to emulate the independent model from within and might have had some success migrating existing assets into a different model, but not really attracting assets. So I think the growth trajectory continues. I think we still see the large wires ceding a lot of business in this direction.
We still see the IBDs graduating a lot of teams to the independent model. I don't see a change in that happening overnight.
Next question comes from Rich Repetto at Piper Sandler. During previous periods of higher volatility, there's been a notion of a shift towards the independent advice and RIA model. Is that something we would expect to see going forward, or has that dynamic shifted at all?
You know, Rich, you always know the note I have in my preparation deck that I don't say during the presentation, that's exactly it. We saw it in the early 2000s. We saw it during the credit crisis, and we certainly have seen it during the pandemic. In times of concern, clients want more help, they want more intimacy, they want more relationship, and they seem to be turning towards advisors, and I expect that to continue. The other thing that's really interesting in that question is that that's existing clients. I think this model favors the clients of the future as well. It's transparent, it's digital, it's relationship driven, and it's an appropriate fee structure for the value add that clients are getting.
I think it wins in the existing and the future space. What would you expect me to say? I guess that was, of course, what I would say, right?
Exactly. Next question, Bernie, is from Rodrigo Casialato at Itaú. Looking at the evolution of the size of some of the RIA firms, do you see any opportunities or risks that they may try to further internalize or verticalize services that might be provided by a custodian like Schwab?
Yeah. I think the inevitability here is that there's firms who are trying to grow more value and more scale as they come together. Don't underestimate how, when I mentioned before that firms typically in size are $300 million-$400 million and there's eight employees, there's a lot of work to be done, and there's a lot of services that they still don't provide. A lot of the consolidation now is simply getting to that point where they're providing the best possible portfolio and relationship capabilities. In some form, when I think about Schwab, and I think about our custodial prowess, in this space, I think about us as an open architecture provider of many of those services. We've talked about the economics in this space many, many times. They're skinny.
If you wanna be in this space, you have to be really good and really scalable at what you do. I think of Schwab as a platform providing services for advisors so that they can stay in the business and grow their businesses, and excel in the way they want to. What happens when a $400 million firm with eight employees doubles in size? Boy, it's a really hard road for them, right? They lean really hard on us to make sure that they can get that growth absorbed, and that they can go for the next $400 million.
Natural follow-on here, Bernie, from Devin Ryan at JMP Securities. Given that open architecture approach that you were just speaking to, you know, where are some of the opportunities that you see that Schwab can continue to build more differentiated solutions for advisors that help them bring those tech costs down or other areas to further scale and, you know, create more value for the relationship?
Well, there's no doubt that deep integrations are going to be a big part of the success. I watch very closely, advisors coming into the space and how many are using multiple custodians and how many times we're seeing single custodians. We've had a lot of success in retaining the assets, in this merger by some very large firms who have committed to us to be sole custodian with us. I think that's evidence that scale and efficiency is incredibly important to them. Now we have to continue to work towards those deep integrations, whether they're through APIs, I'm indifferent to, or proprietary technologies, and then making sure that we're creating the ease that they need in order for them to be as successful as they want to be.
You know, it used to be unique to be a billion-dollar firm in this space. It is. The growth has been enormous and we have a preponderance of billion-dollar firms and multi-billion dollar firms. Now they just need that kind of help. They need that extension, if you will, of their office. Fintech is an enabler of that. Fintech, to me, is not a threat, it's an enabler of us being able to grow this space. I talked about altruism before. You know, one thing I do wanna mention in this space, and there's a lot of competition, I'm not naive to that, but the reality is this space believes in growing the pie much more than it believes in taking a couple of assets from each other. The pie obviously is the more traditional model.
The success is evident that the space is having, and I think it's going to stay focused on that, and that's where I think fintech is going to be a big enabler of that as well, our own as well as third party. Let's never forget the liability side of the balance sheet. You know, I think that is the next key to success in trying to make sure that deep relationships can be served holistically across the client's balance sheet.
Well, thank you very much, Bernie. That is all the questions that we have in the queue at the moment, so we will let you step down. Everyone, we'll be turning to our second and final break of the program today. We look forward to seeing you back for the last two segments at 11:15 A.M. Pacific. Welcome back. Thank you everyone for hanging in there with us as we've gone through, I think, what has been exciting and extended program while navigating some fun on the technical side. We are now excited to have our COO, Joe Martinetto, join us to talk about the Ameritrade integration and some of the other technology scale initiatives. Joe?
Great. Thank you, Jeff, and I will echo some of your comments about appreciating people knowing how valuable their time is hanging in there with us today. I know this is a major commitment of time, and I hope we've made it worthwhile. I myself am going to have a fairly quick update here today, which I hope from an investor perspective you take as good news. Because cutting right to the chase, the bottom line of the presentation is that we're still on track with the targets that we've communicated to you previously regarding the integration of Schwab and TDA. But let me dig in a little bit here and we can get into some of the detail.
We've had over a year together as a combined firm, and we're making solid progress on bringing the platforms together. Since the deal closed, we've made some visible progress on things like rationalizing branch network, but the bulk of the heavy lifting has really been done behind the scenes so far, like integrating our teams into a common management structure and also working on accelerating the scale of technology work that's necessary to bring the firms together. Today, I'd say we're about halfway through the technology work that we have to do to be able to bring those Schwab Green clients onto the Schwab Blue platforms. This year, we're gonna have more behind-the-scenes efforts as we continue to work to bring the technology and our organizations together to be ready for those transitions.
As I said, we're tracking to the integration outcomes that we talked about last year. To reiterate, we still expect to bring the Schwab green clients onto the Schwab blue platforms in 2023, which is within that 30- to 36-month timeframe that we've talked about previously. We're on track with the synergies, and I'll go into a little bit more detail both on the revenue and expense side here in the next couple of slides. We remain on target with our forecast of $2 billion-$2.2 billion in one-time integration expenses. Let's start to dig in on the synergies here.
We've done a really good job, I think, in our first year of beginning to deliver against the synergies, and we've positioned ourselves well for the coming years ahead to stay on track and get the total goals. We've said that in our prior updates, we anticipated that we'd get about a third of our expense synergies in the first four quarters post-close, and we were successful with that. Now about five quarters in, we've achieved about half of our total run rate expense synergies. We've done that through a combination of things like optimizing our branch footprint, and we closed about 215 branches, both on the Schwab and on the TDA side, and we did that without very much impact at all to the overall client experience.
We've also done quite a bit of work on the labor side. We've integrated our teams across all the levels of the organization, largely without experiencing any disruption to how we've been running the business. In addition, we've started to reap some of the benefits from the scale work that we've been doing. I think Neesha spent some time talking about the front to back efforts. These are the pieces that operate on the back that allow us to continue to automate the way we process in the background and to the extent that some of that is in scope for the integration efforts, and we've gotten that into production. We're starting to see some of the benefits from that work already as well.
Finally, on the expense side, we've started to reduce some of our marketing spend on the TDA side. Things like advertising, media agencies, those things that go overall with total marketing spend. We've started to see some of the synergies, been able to recognize those as well. When we look toward the years ahead, we do remain confident that we're going to be able to hit the full $1.8 billion-$2 billion run rate expense synergy that we talked about previously. Most of the remaining synergies are likely to come after the client and advisor transition. That's not to say that we won't see some small benefits as we continue to work our way through the work of this year.
The big drivers of expense synergies yet to come will largely come after that transition. We've got good plans in place, so we're highly confident that we're going to be able to actually get to those kinds of numbers. The things that drive the numbers are efforts like decommissioning legacy systems that we'll be able to turn off once we get past that client conversion date. We also expect that we're gonna be able to continue to streamline in areas like third-party agreements, some additional reductions to marketing, some additional organizational moves. Again, that's gonna rely on being able to get the two platforms brought together.
We expect most of those synergies will flow in throughout 2024, which is a bit of a ways off, and we'll be able to give you more detail on things like the quarterly tracking as we get a little further into these exercises. As always, stay tuned. We will continue to give you updates on some of the more specifics as we get a little closer and have those plans a little bit better developed. Moving on to the revenue synergy side, we have continued to exceed our initial expectations. In the past year, we realized about $160 million in revenue synergies. I would say that the majority of those were captured midyear or later, so we are actually expecting that we'll have at least double the impact from those items as we head into this year.
The biggest driver, no surprise, in the revenue synergies is the bank deposit agreement. We did move about $10 billion in balances in total back to Schwab in July 2021, and we've benefited from the interest revenue that we've been able to recognize on those balances. We're also benefiting from the lower fees on the overall balance arrangement that we negotiated as part of the transaction. As I think we've now talked about several times, the BDA is also the largest driver of what we would anticipate going forward in terms of revenue synergy recognition. That's going to take a protracted period of time here as we work our way through the anticipated drawdowns over the next nine years or so.
The other remaining revenue synergies that we were able to capture last year include things like harmonizing rates for the routing of orders and between the rate harmonization and the volumes that we've seen in transaction flow, we've been able to capture more revenue there than we had originally anticipated. We also worked through some pricing harmonization for OTC equities last year. Then finally, we were able to allow the Schwab broker dealer to lend out some of the securities that are custodied on the TD broker-dealer platform. That has allowed us to take advantage of some of the more automated and highly scalable capabilities that we've built on the Schwab side to get additional balances out and oftentimes at better rates as well. Some synergies coming out of the securities lending piece from those activities.
As we look ahead, the BDA will continue to be the largest element of driving those incremental synergies, as I think, you know, Peter and I have talked about, you know, repeatedly at all of these updates. We will continue to benefit from some of the other levers that I already mentioned, and as volumes and market conditions vary, we'll see potentially some, you know, opportunities to draw a little bit more off of those kinds of moves.
Finally, as a number of people have talked about and related to many of your questions already today, as we get to the point where we've got the two platforms brought together and we're able to offer that fully integrated suite of products and services to all of our clients, we expect that we're gonna be able to take advantage of some of the strong interest we're already seeing from some of the clients to leverage things like wealth management services, pledged asset lending and mortgages into the Schwab Green client base, as well as the adoption of some of the trading capabilities from the Schwab Blue client base as we bring these two firms together along with all those capabilities.
As we start to move a little bit beyond just the pure synergy math, we're doing a lot of work on the underlying systems that should yield some significant benefits in the years to come. That again, I think we've spent time talking about things like the application monetization program in years past. We have added on top of that some of the capacity work that we're going to have to do to be able to absorb not only the market growth but also bringing the two firms' processing needs onto a single platform. On the client side, we expect to be able to deliver some of the key capabilities like thinkorswim, thinkpipes, iRebal to all the clients of the firm by conversion.
Those are big opportunities for the clients to be able to take advantage of some of the best-in-breed platforms that we acquired off the Schwab Green side and make available to the Schwab Blue client base. We've also made solid progress on re-architecting and rebuilding some of our internal infrastructure. Those benefits are probably more opaque to the outside world, so I'll take a second here and walk through some examples to maybe make it a little bit more real to folks what we've been working on and what the outcomes look like. Year-end is traditionally one of our biggest processing events.
When you think about the, you know, the need for clients to do trades to get their tax positions structured appropriately, the cash flow that we tend to see, the things like capital distributions and company and fund dividend distributions, and then the need to close out all of that year-end cost basis work and roll it forward into the opening positions for the next year's cost basis work, that window tends to be a really intense processing window for us. We did expect that we were going to see some enhanced processing times as we moved into this year based on the work that we've already implemented.
We actually saw that we were about 25% faster than our expectations because of the synergistic effects of all of the various pieces of the platform that we've touched now over the course of the last year. That's really impressive when you think about the kinds of volumes that we're seeing today in the context of where we were pre-pandemic. Trade executions on the Schwab Blue side are up by more than 350% in that kind of a window. That then drives into our processing environment, you know, we call it our BP&T platform for balanced positions and trades.
It also saw a 350%+ increase in the number of transactions that we had to post at year-end and we were able to process around 30 million transactions over that year-end window, pretty flawlessly, and as I said, quicker than we had expected. We've also seen volumes increase on things like the cost basis platforms. With the increase in the number of clients, accounts and positions, we've seen cost basis transactions move up by about 35%, over that pre-pandemic window as well, helping to drive some of those additional transactions across the platform. Significant volume growth, we are definitely putting a real live stress test through our environment and I think coming through it with flying colors at this point.
There's more work on the scalability side that we're gonna be able to do as we continue to work through the remainder of the integration work. We're also seeing real benefits to the resiliency side of the firm. We've continued to do work on some of the hosting platforms and the move to the zone region approach that we've talked about historically, which really should enable us to recover more quickly when we do experience problems. A little bit more of that inside baseball here. We have a code base that runs on the mainframe that we call host fallback that has a pretty limited set of capabilities for the clients to be able to continue to transact at points and times when other parts of our infrastructure are down.
That has been our main recovery vehicle for as long as I can remember. We actually think that we're gonna be retiring host fallback this year as we get fully implemented on that more distributed zone region approach. You know, we continue to see real benefits to the clients and ultimately to the firm as well from some of the work that we're doing on scalability and resiliency. While a lot of this work will bear benefits for years to come, the focus here continues to be getting the client conversion and recognizing the deal synergies that we've committed to. That's job one pretty much for everybody across the firm. With that, I will wrap up my remarks, and we'll turn it over to Jeff and see if we've got any questions.
Thank you, Joe. Of course, everyone always has questions for you. First question comes from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. The 50% run rate expense synergy number that you quoted was a little bit higher than the kind of up to 40% that had previously been discussed. Could you talk about what other incremental synergies we've captured over the last few months?
Sure. I think the biggest benefits largely have continued to come through in some of the moves that we've made around the non-systems areas. We've made progress around not just branch, but also some of the corporate real estate footprints. We've continued to take actions in some of the org structure pieces. As we've worked to realign the organization, we found that we had some opportunities that we hadn't counted on quite as early. You know, I would say that the management team has been really focused where possible around making sure that they're really getting the organization aligned appropriately. That has led to some you know additional thinning at the more senior ranks of the organization.
The time frames that we're talking about here to be able to get to full integration are pretty long. I think we originally came in thinking that we would have the organizations probably run more separately for a period of time. As we really started to think about how do we wanna run the firm in the interim, we saw opportunities to bring more of the managerial ranks together more quickly to help us streamline decision-making and really drive the effectiveness of the integration window. I'd say it's been a variety of things across the organization. It's more of an acceleration of items that we had already anticipated as opposed to incremental items.
Going back to, I don't think that the total number has changed that we still expect to be roughly in that same target range. We probably pulled some of the year two and year three benefits ahead a little bit. As I said, the next major benefit largely will come from post-transition as we start to you know eliminate some of the duplicated systems and processes that won't be necessary as we move to that single broker-dealer operating model.
A follow on there, Joe, from Rich Repetto at Piper Sandler. So the items that you just kind of listed out, are those the ones that will carry over and we'd expect to see manifest in terms of run rate expense saves during 2022? Or what can we see between the next major event, as you said, which is the client conversion date and thereafter?
I think you're going to see relatively small changes in the expense profile between here and client transition. We will continue to do work around, you know, places where we think we have opportunities. As we, you know, bring some of the scalability work into production, we'll be able to take advantage of some of the benefits on the processing automation side. I wouldn't expect that we're going to have, you know, really big, chunky further expense reductions until we get to the point where we can start turning off platforms now.
Maybe switching to the revenue synergy side. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of our thinking around order flow and how that has evolved as we moved to Harmonize earlier this past year? Maybe any additional perspectives you might have on the broader regulatory outlook on that? That question's from Craig Siegenthaler at Bank of America.
Sure. I think we spent a fair amount of time on this in the last couple of updates. I'll hit it kind of at a high level, and if we have more detailed question here, we can try to get at it. You know, I think we learned a lot post-close around how some of the order flow revenue was being driven on the TDA broker-dealer side that we didn't have complete transparency into, because of some of the limitations around how the deal was being reviewed prior to the close. As we started to dig in on what was the driver, some of the assumptions we were making of, you know, which volumes, which products, which markets were a little bit different than we had anticipated.
As we were able to really kind of dig into those details, we found some opportunities to move to order flow price points that we feel are still, you know, really great, allow us to deliver really strong client executions and, you know, be able to move to more commonality across the way the equity and option order flow pricing works across both firms. I think we made some assumptions that weren't entirely accurate, that early on led us to think maybe there was gonna be a dis-synergy there. When we actually got into the details of the specifics of the order flow, we determined that it was actually gonna be more of a synergy than a dis-synergy. That was a, you know, a nice surprise as we got into the detail.
Regarding some of the longer term implications, you know, I don't know that I or others at the firm have a whole lot that we can add beyond what's already out in the public. We will continue to work to, you know, to the extent possible, participate in the dialogue in the industry. We will work to educate regulators and legislators wherever possible. We do believe that the current market structure has led to outcomes for investors where they're seeing executions that are better than they've ever experienced in the marketplace.
We hope people are going to be careful if there are any changes that are proposed around market structure regulation to not, you know, have a negative impact on, you know, things that have led to, you know, significantly better outcomes for investors, for the sake of trying to offset, you know, maybe some perceived issues in other areas. You know, we don't know more than anybody else does about what the overall agenda is going to be or if any, if and when any rules are proposed, what they'll look like.
You know, again, we want, you know, I think we're on record as saying that the current structure has actually had a pretty significant benefit to investors, and we would like to see those benefits maintained as any changes are, you know, contemplated.
Staying on the revenue synergy front, question from Steven Chubak. Putting the BDA piece aside, as you already referenced that being the largest contributor, could you help unpack some of the other drivers or perhaps scope the opportunities outside of the BDA and maybe around either the sizing or potential timelines of those revenue synergy buckets?
Sure. Again, I would say, you know, BDA was anticipated to be about 60% of the revenue synergies, and we're still on track for a number in that area. You know, setting that aside is setting aside a pretty big block of the synergy expectations on the revenue side. You know, we've given you, I think, you know, good numbers on where we are on some of the pieces, that we've executed on already.
You know, the piece that probably sits in the middle that hasn't been recognized and hasn't been maybe as detailed, although I think you can kind of back into it now with the various pieces you have, is the opportunity for you know, deeper product adoption or client adoption of some of the products that weren't available to either side prior to that transition. We do have you know, reasonable expectations as you know, a number of people talked about around you know, adoption of things like wealth management services from clients that you know, may appear to be self-directed, but may have broader needs that they'll look to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities that we've built up around wealth management.
We also see some really solid opportunities to continue to make inroads around things like pledged asset lending and mortgage that hasn't been available on the Schwab Green side at all. Making that available, I think will lead to some incremental revenue synergies. Finally, as we've talked about, we could see some uplift in trading activity from the adoption of some of the platforms that we are bringing across from the Green side and making available to the Schwab Blue client base. There's a number of things that we're pretty excited about that we, you know, are hopeful that the clients are going to adopt. We've gotten some pretty strong indications of interest out of the client base for when this stuff will be available to them.
I think you know, we feel optimistic, but time will tell as we get to the point where we can actually make the offerings and get a real measure of what the adoption's going to be.
Maybe pivoting to a broader technology question around the cloud. A question from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. How are you and the team thinking about, you know, the opportunity to migrate various parts of the tech stack or back office to the cloud, and what areas are most attractive? Any sense on timeframe?
Sure. Cloud has become an increasingly important component of how we think about where we're going to access computing technology and capacity over the coming timeframe. We do have a series of work that, you know, we have to execute on over the course of the next couple of years related to integration that will, in some respects, limits some of the more rapid adoption of cloud. Although I would say even in that work, the types of systems we're building and the way we're implementing them will allow us to take a chunk of that volume out to the cloud when the time is right.
I'd say, you know, as recently as maybe a year ago, we were thinking of the cloud as being something that we would look to take some smaller, less important parts of the processing infrastructure out to first. I think we've done some of that and have had some pretty good experience and are looking to continue to expand on some of those activities. Whereas I think we've also brought some parts of the, you know, bigger parts of the client processing platform out to the cloud as sort of primary development. An example of that would be some of the work we've been doing with thematic investing. Pretty much all of that is being built for cloud deployment rather than on-premise deployment.
As new work is happening, we're thinking about the cloud as being a potential primary hosting opportunity rather than setting it up on premise and then talking about migrating it. You know, we do see the cloud as being an important step for us over time, particularly in terms of things like managing burst capacity. I would warn people though that in that interim transition window, the cost benefit of moving to cloud are likely going to be, you know, pretty de minimis to even some additional cost as we, you know, spend money to move to the cloud before we get the benefits of running some of the platforms in the cloud.
You know, I think it's something that we're looking at and see some value for the long run, and you know, it does seem to be that it is the future the way the technology hosting is going to work. But I would caution people about trying to get too optimistic about short-term cost savings. There's not a whole lot of examples out there in the marketplace of people that have made, you know, bigger and aggressive shifts to the cloud that have actually recognized material reductions in their cost base in the process of doing that. It's much more around functionality, modernity, some of the capabilities that the cloud providers have been able to build that would be hard to procure or hard to build on-site.
It gives you additional functionality that you may not have been able to build, but it's not looking like it's a material cost driver for at least the near future.
Joe, maybe pivoting back to the Ameritrade economics and synergy story. Question from Brennan Hawken at UBS. Maybe just to reclarify and talk just a little bit more in detail to the extent you can around, you know, the client conversion event and some of the follow-on, you know, decommissioning other activities that will follow and trail that.
Sure. We'll have a lot more information to share as we get further into the year. Right now I would say that we're going to do. You know, we've been doing a series of mock conversions as we've been bringing work into production. We have a very large mock test that we're going to be doing in the third quarter of this year, which will give us a lot more insight because of the range of things that we'll be evaluating and the scale of the accounts and positions that we're going to be testing against to give us a good sense of exactly how much we're going to be able to absorb and that will help us to be able to size the tranches that we'll be thinking about for movement.
This is not gonna be one big tranche, and I think we've talked about that. You know, as of now, we've got a going in set of assumptions around how many tranches and over what kind of a timeframe. We really wanna get through that test later in the year to be able to have more comfort that what we've been planning for is also lining up with our ability to process. I think as we get into the fall, we'll have a lot more to say about the timeframe, but right now I would say we're still in that 30- to 36-month kinda timeframe for conversion. We expect to do it over a limited number of tranches. You know, we'll have more details as we get a little further into some of the internal work this year.
Thank you very much, Joe. We're up on time for this segment. We appreciate it. We will now turn to our last, but not least segment, our CFO, Peter Crawford.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate that, last but not least. I do wanna thank all of you for hanging in on this multi-hour webcast. I know we've all been spending too much time staring into our computer screens, so I appreciate all of you hanging in there. I certainly hope that last year's virtual format would be a non-recurring experience, but alas, the pandemic had other plans, and I certainly join my colleagues in hoping that next year we're able to see all of you in person.
You've heard from all my colleagues over the last few hours really about the strong momentum we have in the marketplace, about the progress we're making with the Ameritrade integration, as Joe just talked about, digital transformation, the relationship expansion, and really the rest of our broad strategic agenda. You've heard about the enviable competitive position we've created across our two primary businesses and the significant opportunities we have to drive greater efficiency throughout our business, grow solutions that are win for clients and a win for Schwab, enhance offerings for key segments, all in support of better serving our clients and growing our business.
As we go to the next page here, in my time, I really do my best to recap yet another extraordinary year, a word that that Walt used, which certainly we don't use lightly, but a year in which we are able to produce unprecedented financial performance amidst an interest rate environment that has been challenging for our business. Also talk about 2022, a year I described in our last business update in October as being potentially a transitional year, but one with some exciting possibilities for our business and our clients.
I think what you'll see when you combine the financial picture and the strategic agenda we've discussed is that we're entering this year in a position of strength, poised to translate an improving interest rate environment into continued financial growth while we make prudent investments in the future of the company, all of which makes us even more confident and optimistic about the opportunities ahead. Let's talk about some of the factors that contributed to our outstanding financial performance in 2021. One year ago, at this meeting, we shared three so-called mathematical illustrations demonstrating how our 2021 financial performance could evolve given changes in trading, margin utilization and client cash on the balance sheet.
We did that, as you may recall, given the difficulty in predicting how client behavior would evolve from the then record activity levels we saw in the fourth quarter of 2020. Now what those three illustrations shared were a set of common assumptions around, quote, "normal equity market appreciation, relatively stable interest rates," the timing of our initial migration from the BDA to our balance sheet and the level of CapEx. I think it's fair to say that 2021 unfolded in a way that was considerably better than those macro assumptions contemplated with the equity markets marching higher, interest rates rising a bit more quickly than anticipated.
Somewhat stronger securities lending, driven largely by heavy interest and hard to borrow stocks in the first half of the year, and the initial migrations from the BDA happening on schedule. The client-driven metrics also finished at the upper end of the range of illustrations in the case of trading, and actually above the range in the case of margin utilization and balance sheet growth. Now, our financial performance for the year reflected the more favorable economic environment as well as our very strong client engagement. Now, given that the acquisition of Ameritrade closed in the fourth quarter of 2020, which made those year-over-year comparisons not as meaningful, the illustrations we share provide a perspective on full-year revenue and adjusted expenses relative to Q4 2020 annualized.
You can see that revenue exceeded the range we communicated by a very wide margin. Adjusted expenses also finished above the range, due in large part to the regulatory charge and higher bonus funding as we exceeded our objectives on expense synergies, as Joe talked about. Now, that combination produced a full-year adjusted pre-tax margin of 47.5%, our highest level ever, and $3.25 of adjusted EPS up 33%, year-over-year. Now, our balance sheet grew dramatically during the year due to strong organic growth, as well as client cash allocation decisions. End of period, total assets grew 22% over twelve months, driven by a 24% increase in bank deposits, mostly Bank Sweep, and a 21% increase in payables to brokerage clients.
I'll note that nearly $45 billion of that growth happened in December alone, a function of the exceptional asset gathering that Walt mentioned and also seasonal cash flows. Now, within our interest-earning assets, we experienced the strongest growth in margin lending and bank lending, both of which grew over 40% in balances. We increased our debt by a net $10 billion to supplement our liquidity, and our consolidated tier one leverage ratio declined slightly given the strong asset growth, but the ratio at our three banks are all above 7%. Now, our success in 2021 provides a lot of momentum as we begin 2022.
Even so, our performance will be influenced, as always, by a number of dynamics that are difficult to predict and largely beyond our control, including health and economic trends, what happens with the equity markets and how investors are feeling and the engagement and attitudes of our clients. Now, those of you who attended these business updates over the years know that we typically share an outlook for the year based on a set of assumptions. To be clear, this is not a forecast per se, nor guidance.
Rather, it's a construct to provide insight on how our financial performance might unfold given certain underlying conditions, while giving all of you the ability to adjust those underlying assumptions based on your views on how macro factors might unfold or real-time data you're seeing, such as our regular trade reporting. Now, the assumptions within our scenario this year include three Fed hikes in March, June, and September. Long-term rates that follow the forward curve as of early January 2022. Our normal equity market appreciation assumption from that January level, and volatility similar to what we experienced in late 2021. Trading activity and securities lending consistent with the last quarter or two. Again, this is not a forecast, but simply the mathematical underpinnings of this scenario.
Then an increase in our balance sheet of roughly 3% over the course of the year. CapEx equivalent to roughly 4%-5% of revenue, driven mostly by the integration-related investments that Joe referenced. Now, I know these interest rate assumptions look a little stale, maybe a little conservative at this point, given how much the market expectations have moved over, frankly, the last 24 hours and certainly the last few weeks. As we always do, rest assured, we have included in the appendix sensitivities around how revenue could be influenced by changes in these and other assumptions. You can take this scenario, apply your own views on how the year might unfold, and therefore refresh the scenario as appropriate.
That scenario could produce revenue growth of 9%-10% year-over-year, driven primarily by an interest increase in net interest revenue. Adjusted expense growth of 6%-7%, which I'll discuss in a lot more detail in just a bit. Adjusted pre-tax margin of at least 48%. As we seem to be on the cusp of another rising rate cycle, we thought it would be helpful to provide some context on how that will impact, not just impact us, not just in 2022, but over time. Our financial performance will clearly benefit tremendously from higher rates, as it did during the 2015 through 2019 period.
Though some attributes of our investment portfolios are different today than last time. You know, 40% of our interest earning assets are floating rate today versus 60% six years ago. The duration of our investment portfolio is a bit longer and we don't have the same amount of, quote, dry powder in the form of bulk transfers. Our asset and liability management philosophy remains essentially the same and will be informed by some longer-term considerations, including client cash allocation behavior, which we know is heavily influenced by the rate environment, deposit betas, what we anticipate for deposit betas, which we expect to be consistent with the last cycle, loan growth, which Rick and Walt both discussed at length.
It is, and as they discussed, it's good both strategically and financially, but it does require us to maintain a bit more liquidity with the investment portfolio in order to support potential fluctuations in client cash balances over time. Then, of course, maintaining sufficient liquidity to support that client behavior. Now, the bottom line is that, you know, higher rates are clearly quite helpful to our business model, both in the near term and then over time, but they do require thoughtful management. Shifting our attention to 2022. There are three primary factors that will influence the near-term NIM trajectory. Our balance sheet positioning, loan growth, both bank and margin, and our overall mix of interest-earning assets, and of course, what happens with securities lending. We'll start with balance sheet positioning.
You know, our balance sheet is clearly positioned to benefit from higher rates. The 40% of our interest-earning assets that are floating rates should reflect a higher Fed funds rate pretty quickly. While the benefit from higher long-term rates should accrue to the fixed portfolio over time. Now, as rates increase, our liability duration contracts, and we look to decrease our asset duration as well. In addition, given the recent surge in client cash and our expectation for higher rates through 2022, we expect to maintain a higher level of liquidity. We may also lean more heavily on treasuries than we have in the past to maintain sufficient flexibility in the event that lending growth, margin, PAL, mortgage, et cetera, to the extent that trends higher or we see a return of client cash sorting.
Speaking of growth and lending, we've seen substantial growth, and as I mentioned, and as my colleagues mentioned in margin utilization, Schwab Bank mortgages and pledged asset lines. At the same time, as Rick emphasized, we still believe there's a lot of opportunity to increase adoption of our very compelling bank solutions. While that growth is clearly a good thing, it does create some challenges. Given the LCR rule, we have to maintain extra free credits at the broker-dealer to support margin activity, cash which would otherwise be swept to the bank. Then as bank lending increases, that puts more onus on the investment portfolio to have sufficient liquidity to support potential fluctuations in client cash levels. Finally, we come to securities lending.
We're really bullish on the opportunity created by the marriage of Ameritrade's large inventory of hard-to-borrow stocks and Schwab's advanced capabilities. It's already been a revenue synergy that we've been able to capitalize on. We're also excited about our position as the largest lender of hard-to-borrow stocks. We certainly saw the benefits of that combination in 2021 with roughly $700 million of revenue. We believe that over the long term, that revenue should grow with the growth of total client assets and the growth of margin balances. In the near term, demand for hard-to-borrow stocks and therefore, the revenue we generate can vary a lot from day to day or even month to month or quarter to quarter.
Therefore, its contribution to our net interest margin can vary, as we've seen this last year. Our scenario simply assumes that securities lending revenue is generally consistent with the fourth quarter of 2021. Of course, again, we can see some variability, so clearly stay tuned. Put all that together and that scenario would produce a full-year NIM in the low 1.50s%, but with sequential increases between Q1 and Q4, resulting in Q4 NIM in the mid 1.60s%. Now, I'll say it again. This is not a forecast, but this is what could result, I should say, from the scenario I described earlier. You know, a moment ago, I shared our assumption around trading activity remaining consistent with Q4.
The other key assumption embedded within the scenario is that derivatives continue to account for 23% of the total. Now, that percentage is the highest it's been in about two years. When you look over the longer term, it's not at all atypical. In fact, what you see is that the share of derivatives tends to fall when we see a surge in trading overall, as with the onset of COVID and the meme stock frenzy. The reason that is because those periods of heightened engagement tend to increase equity trading more than derivatives trading. That was the revenue story. Let's turn to expenses. You know, Schwab, I think for those of you who've been following the company for a long time know that Schwab has always had a focus on disciplined, rigorous, and consistent expense management.
It's why we often talk about our declining EOCA or expense on client assets. You know, something Walt talked about in his remarks, which we view as a key competitive advantage. It's how we've been able to increase margins even as our ROCA or our revenue on client assets has declined due to investor preferences for low-cost solutions and our own history of using pricing to benefit clients. Now that downward trend in EOCA reflects a business model that is intentionally designed to be very scalable. But it's also an outcome of prioritization, of being fiscally disciplined and of making investments that enable greater efficiency and productivity. Finally, it's influenced heavily by our ability to grow, adding to our scale and allowing us to amortize our fixed costs over a larger and larger client base.
That successful long-term expense management requires a combination of attention to the short term with prudent investments that enable long-term growth and efficiency. With that as context, let's unpack our expense growth story and really talk about the factors driving our anticipated adjusted expense growth of 6%-7%. I think what you'll see is that while that level is above the mid-single-digit expense growth we've repeatedly stated as what we expect as a long-term trend, that core growth expectation is still quite appropriate. I'm talking about how we get to that conclusion. We start with this waterfall chart with our 2021 GAAP expenses of $10.8 billion.
Then we deduct $1.1 billion of acquisition and integration costs, as well as the amortization of acquired intangibles. That gets us to our reported adjusted expense number. We then have several items that I won't necessarily call one time, but are not long-term recurring expense drivers, and therefore shouldn't be factors in thinking about our multiyear expense growth trend. Some of these boost year-over-year comparisons, and some of them lower those comps. We'll start by backing out a couple of items that inflated our 2021 adjusted expenses, specifically the approximately $200 million reserve related to the SEC matter and the extra bonus accrual related to our strong financial performance relative to the board-approved financial plan. Together, those subtract about four percentage points from the expected 2022 numbers.
Now, like many others, we've experienced compensation pressure across our employee base. I mean, listening to calls over the last couple of weeks, I think you've heard that as a consistent theme. We respond to that pressure with our 5% across the board salary increase that we announced and implemented at the end of Q3, as well as a number of targeted adjustments implemented over the course of last year. Now, I can't obviously say exactly how much longer this compensation pressure will last. No one certainly can or if when we'll, you know, we'll have to make further adjustments beyond our traditional merit increase budget. I can say we feel really good about our current ability to attract and retain talent, which is critical for us.
Now, the full year impact of those increases translates into about 2.5 percentage points of adjusted expense growth. We talked at last year's winter business update about the need to shore up our client-facing staffing to support the extraordinary growth in our client base and the equally extraordinary client engagement we've seen. We're gonna make a lot of progress. Jonathan talked about this last year, improving service levels in our phone centers and relationship coverage by financial consultants. Most of those hires were made mid-year. When you look at year-over-year comparisons, there will be some expense growth related to the full year impact of those hires. We also know that newer clients engage with us a lot more actively than existing clients.
We'll need a bit more coverage for the upcoming tax season, which will be the first time many of our clients have had the pleasure to look at a 1099 report or have to understand their cost basis. Those two impacts add 1.5-two percentage points of growth. It's important to understand that barring another increase in client engagement or outsized new client acquisition, we wouldn't expect this component to contribute to further growth in expenses in future years. Now, the next segment on the waterfall is one of the reasons I said previously that this would be a bit of a transition year. You know, Joe was alluding to this in some of his comments as well.
We've disclosed previously our plan to spend $2 billion-$2.2 billion on the integration of Ameritrade. Now, most of that spending is expensed as we spend it and excluded from the adjusted expenses, the numbers that we disclose. Some of it pays for the development of software necessary for the integration, which we capitalize and then amortize over time, and per accounting rules, is not excluded from adjusted expenses. To support the combined client base at client conversion, we need to add hardware to our Schwab infrastructure. We're migrating all these Ameritrade accounts over to the Schwab infrastructure. We need to make sure we have enough capacity to be able to support them at client conversion.
That will allow us to decommission some of the legacy infrastructure post-conversion and also provides us enough capacity to absorb continued growth for years afterwards. Now, admittedly, we're potentially being a little conservative in terms of the amount of capacity we're adding, but we appreciate the considerable reputational and financial risk of having too little capacity. Now, the depreciation of that hardware is also included in this bucket. It's partially a replacement of other costs and partially an acceleration of expenses we'd be building over time. All clearly relates to readiness for client conversion. As I mentioned before, while it might seem like these should be excluded from adjusted expenses, they're not. This adds 3.5-four percentage points to our adjusted expense growth. Then we have what we call core growth of 4.5%.
This includes additional staffing and expense to support more normalized levels of growth in our client base, our typical merit increase budget, et cetera. Finally, incremental synergy realization of roughly 2%. And as Joe noted in his section, and as we've said, previously, you know, 2022 will have fewer expense synergy milestones than 2021, but we still have the annualized benefit of the number of actions that we took last year. All of that nets to an estimated growth in adjusted expenses of 6%-7%. Now, one final point I want to emphasize, which is that if the environment turns out to be more helpful than the scenario envisions, I would not expect a significant increase in discretionary spending from these levels.
There might be some expenses that are influenced directly, for example, bonus funding, but the vast majority of any rate upside should flow to the bottom line. Now, returning to that long-term expense trend, that level of adjusted expense growth would allow us to continue marching EOCA ever lower, perhaps lowering it by one to two basis points versus 2021. Maintaining sufficient capital and liquidity is a key enabler of our long-term growth. Our robust growth in 2021 did reduce our consolidated tier-one leverage ratio, and that was despite last year's very busy financing activities. Now, as we look ahead to 2022, there are a couple of potential developments I just want to call your attention to.
First is that we have reclassified about $110 billion of securities from available for sale, or AFS, to held to maturity, HTM. We did this since we're edging closer to the $700 billion threshold at which we'll lose the ability to exclude changes in the mark-to-market value of those AFS securities from our regulatory capital. It's better to migrate those securities before interest rates increase. Second, you undoubtedly saw that the board increased our quarterly dividend by $0.02 to $0.20, maintaining it within our target range. Third, we do expect to migrate additional balances from the IDA over to our balance sheet, though the exact timing and amount are still TBD.
Fourth and finally, if interest rates increase as expected, that should increase the speed at which our capital ratios return to traditional levels due to the combination of stronger capital formation, as well as a slowing of balance sheet growth. Eventually, this should bring forward the timing of resuming additional capital return via preferred redemptions and/or buybacks, though I am certainly not making any public prediction that this will happen in 2022 or later. Before I close, I just want to take just a moment to pull up from the conversation around NIM and expense synergies and the accounting conventions, which certainly while important are very much short-term in nature. Over the long term, our success is enabled by what we view as six key competitive advantages.
I would say that foremost among these, I think what most of us would say is foremost among these, and the one that is the hardest for a new entrant to replicate is our scale. Along with that, the operating efficiency that scale facilitates. That is what has enabled us to consistently drive down EOCA over time, as I showed earlier, and to offer our clients a better overall value as measured by ROCA or revenue on client assets. Also, as I mentioned, we, you know, we didn't achieve that advantage by accident. It was the product of a consistent focus over five decades on expense discipline and growth, and we are very much committed to maintain that leadership position. Let me just close with a few thoughts.
You know, we're very gratified by the financial and operating performance of the company in 2021. More than $550 billion in core net new assets, a 33% increase in adjusted EPS, nearly 48% adjusted pre-tax margin, and 22% return on tangible common equity. Those results are the product of decades of executing our through client's eyes strategy and the hard work of our talented group of over 30,000 employees. I think also provide an early demonstration of the considerable potential of the combination of Schwab and TD Ameritrade. Now, I've talked a few times about how 2022 may be a bit of a transitional year, a transition to a single integrated company with a common set of platforms and solutions.
A transition seemingly to a more normal interest rate environment, which could improve our financial performance beyond the levels we reached in 2021. What is not going to change amid this transition is that through client's eyes strategy, our commitment to our employees and the communities we serve, and our philosophy in managing this company and earning and maintaining the trust of all of our stakeholders. Thank you very much. With that, let's, I'll turn it over to Jeff for some questions. Jeff.
Thank you very much, Peter. You know, let's start on the balance sheet with a question from Will Nance from Goldman Sachs. Could you talk a little bit more around the assumption that is underpinning that 3% balance sheet growth? Is there anything around sorting, and how should the investment community think about potential cash sorting in another rate tightening cycle?
Yeah. There's a couple of assumptions that I think would be within that 3% growth. First, you know, we typically see in the early part of every calendar year a somewhat slower balance sheet growth. As the cash that builds up in the fourth quarter of the previous year, a lot of that gets invested, gets deployed. Then second, we typically have seasonal tax flows that limit the amount of balance sheet growth. That's one factor that we feel early in the year, or we anticipate early in the year.
The second is, you know, if you look historically. The client cash sorting tends to really start once you get a Fed funds kind of above that 75 basis point range. That's what we saw historically. At that point, above 75 basis points, it's a point at which money funds start offering a little bit more of a yield, and therefore there becomes more of an incentive or motivation for clients who have rate-sensitive cash or that, what we call investment cash, to move some of that off the balance sheet into money funds or CDs or whatever.
We wouldn't expect as much of that in the first part of the year, given the scenario that we described, but if that scenario that we described unfolds, we might start to see some of that towards the later part of the year. Those would be the two offsetting factors that would perhaps limit the amount of balance sheet growth relative to what we've been experienced more recently, and given what we expect to be continued strong organic growth.
Staying on the balance sheet, Peter, question from Craig Siegenthaler at Bank of America. Can you help maybe with further link together some of the commentary and the excitement from the management team around the opportunity for further lending across the client base with, we'll say, the relatively consistent contribution of about 20% to the overall interest earning asset base?
I think there's a couple of things going on there. I mean, you know, if you look at the growth on lending year-over-year, it's you know, 40%. If you look at mortgage and our overall bank lending over 40% year-over-year, which is you know, fantastic. That's the combination of, I would say, you know, a few different things. Our Investor Advantage Pricing on our mortgage portfolio, which is exceptional, absolutely exceptional pricing. A greater familiarity by both our clients and our client-facing employees with our lending solutions. Then, of course, the refinancing wave that we've seen.
You know, I think if we as we go forward, and Rick talked about this as well, you know, to the extent that interest rates increase, one would expect that the refinancing opportunity gives way to more of a new purchase opportunity. But we think that there's so much untapped opportunity out there on both with the you know legacy Schwab clients, as well as what we you know call the Green clients, the legacy Ameritrade clients, who haven't had access to these great solutions, that we think there's a lot of opportunity there. With the pledged asset line, there's a ton of opportunity there as well with both our retail clients and our advisors.
You know, a lot of that is about one, making them familiar with it, and then two, making it easier for those clients to be able to utilize our tremendous Pledged Asset Line solution.
Switching to NIM, Peter, question from Brennan Hawken at UBS. Can you spend a little time just providing some more insight around what's assumed around premium amortization in the portfolio, in the NIM commentary you just provided?
Yeah. We saw a we've had a lot of conversations about premium amortization, I know, in these meetings over the last two years, I suppose. We did see a reduction in premium amortization from October to November to December. We would expect, as you know, as interest rates, to the extent that longer-term rates increase and mortgage rates increase, we certainly would expect a slowdown in paydown activity. That should be reflected in lower premium amortization. On the whole, if you look at just the back book, the existing securities that we hold, we'd expect that should be a reduction in that level of premium amortization of probably 10-20 basis points by the third or fourth quarter of this year.
When you look at what we also should see, there is certainly an embedded premium on the existing securities, and that will have to amortize over time, so it's not like it's going to go to zero. As we purchase new securities, you know, again, with higher rates, there should be less premium embedded in some of those securities. You know, over time, I'd expect this number to become less of a topic of conversation going forward.
Staying around the NIM topic here, question from Devin Ryan at JMP Securities. Many of the operatives in the broadly defined fintech space have talked about the potential opportunity to pass along more of the rate upside to their clients in terms of cash pricing. Your thoughts and perspective on that, and is there any reason to believe that the approach to deposit betas would be different than prior cycles because of this change in dynamic?
Well, what I would say is, for those clients who are looking for higher yield, we have solutions that'll essentially pass along 100% of the rate upside to clients, and that's called prime money funds. That, you know, once we cover the fee waivers, any upside on short-term rates gets reflected in the yield. We have these great, you know, we have very great low-cost prime money fund solutions available to our clients, and we've certainly seen our clients capitalize on those in, you know, when we saw rates increase previously. You know, the conversation around deposit betas, you know, ultimately comes back to our fundamental cash strategy, which is really predicated on this idea that our clients have two buckets of cash.
They have transactional cash, which is the cash that flows in and out of the account. Sometimes called cash awaiting investment. It tends to be smaller dollars or a shorter time horizon. It's less rate sensitive. You have investment cash, which is larger dollars, longer time horizon that is more rate sensitive. What we expect is as rates increase, that clients who have that investment cash will move some of that cash off our balance sheet into those higher yielding alternatives, whether it's a money fund or a CD or whatever. For that transactional cash, we don't need to
We offer liquidity, we offer that ease of use, and we offer a competitive rate that is frankly better than what they're going to get at other accounts at, you know, the big banks that have similar features like check writing and bill pay and debit cards and so forth. You know, that's why we feel very confident about our deposit betas and because it is a fundamental outgrowth of our cash strategy.
Question on reinvestment yields from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. How are you seeing that trend here to start the year? Maybe some color around what's embedded within the scenario you outlined earlier today.
What's embedded within the scenario are the assumptions I laid out in terms of the three Fed increases. I should also say we're also assuming stable credit spreads. I know a number of market prognosticators anticipate that credit spreads should widen as the Fed finishes their bond buying and then potentially moves into a which actually shrinks their balance sheet. In addition to that, I would say a couple of things as we think about reinvestment rates.
First, given those dynamics that I talked about in response to the previous question, you know, we do expect to maintain a bit of a higher level of liquidity through the year than our typical 5%-7% liquidity position. Second, as I mentioned in my opening comments, as interest rates increase, the liability duration decreases, we need to decrease our asset duration. We will be likely shortening the duration of our purchases to make that adjustment. Once we get to the right place from an asset duration standpoint, we can more normalize that asset duration of the new purchases.
The reinvestment rates, you know, today, if I were to quote, these numbers change, frankly, by the hour or by the day. We're seeing, you know, floating rate I would say are in a similar range. Of course, those floating rates should go up quickly with the expectations around the Fed funds increasing. The MBS that we tend to buy is probably in the 1.70%-1.80% range. Then the Treasuries that we purchase are kind of more in the, you know, maybe 1.10%, maybe, more like or closer to 1.20% range.
I think you put all that together, and you're probably looking at a weighted average reinvestment rate right now, you know, right as I sit here today in late January, probably in the 1.40%-1.60% range. With that, where it falls within that kind of varying a little bit by the hour, and then also based on the mix between those different securities that we would be purchasing.
A couple of broader questions around the scenario from the likes of Bill Katz and Dan Fannon. As you lay that out, what was the starting point for the equity market appreciation, either now or at the beginning of the year? Were there any pricing actions assumed within the scenario you outlined?
The starting point for the equity market appreciation, I want to say, is January seventh or eighth. I mean, sort of earliest in January. I think we have the ending point for the S&P 500, what the assumption is on there. Pricing actions. Yeah, we certainly don't like to sort of tip our hand around anything from a pricing standpoint. Whatever we're contemplating would be embedded within the scenario to the extent that we know about it right now.
Switching over to expenses, question from Rich Repetto, Piper Sandler. Could you revisit your discussion around that additional technology-related spend to drive integration and talk about what portion of that expense of that 3.5%-4% range is included within that $2 billion-$2.2 billion integration budget that Joe's talked about?
Yeah, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I would guess that the majority of it is not within that $2 billion-$2.2 billion bucket. It is really about this building of scale. But it will allow, as I said. I mean, it's you know, when you sort of go back and think about this, it's you know, for somebody who's a you know. The simplistic way I was talking to our CIO about this, you know, certainly about what's involved here.
You know, some might think that it's as easy as we've got a bunch of TD Ameritrade servers and data centers and so forth, and we got a bunch of Schwab servers and data centers, and all we have to do to support this combined client base is, you know, hook coaxial cable between the two of them. It's not that simple. We have to build up that capacity on the Schwab platform with the Schwab infrastructure that will support that account growth. Then we have to have enough capacity to support potentially another surge like what we saw in the first quarter of last year in activity.
While we're doing it, make sure we've got enough growth or enough capacity to support us for the next several years. It's related to the integration, but it also has benefits well beyond the integration as well. That's the key part of it.
Circling back to client cash, follow-up question from Brian Bedell at Deutsche Bank. How would you characterize the recent client allocation to cash levels in terms of the longer-term trajectory and any changes in how you're seeing client allocations evolve?
Well, I mean, if you look over the long term, you know, client cash allocation levels are really a function of a couple of things. You know, one is investor enthusiasm, investor sentiment on the market, and that can, that's hard to predict, right? Very, very hard to predict whether clients, investors are gonna be net buyers or net sellers. It can flip in an hour, you know, we've seen it this week. It can flip in the span of a few hours. That's very hard to predict. Also the alternatives in terms of from a yield standpoint, which are a function of the rate environment, both primarily short-term rates, but also to a lesser extent long-term rates.
If you look historically, we've often talked about that client cash allocation being hovering above and below, you know, 12% seems to be like a point at which it kind of goes up and down from. You know, obviously at below that point, we're also coming off a period where investor enthusiasm, you know, investors have been very enthusiastic about the market, have been strong net buyers of the market. We can see that change. You know, we're not assuming in our in that scenario, either in the revenue outlook or in the balance sheet assumption or our NIM assumption that we see a dramatic change in investor sentiment, which changes those client cash allocations.
Certainly that's something that is one of those, as I mentioned, that's one of those variables that's a little harder to predict.
Maybe related, another related follow on here, Peter, from Will Nance at Goldman Sachs. Can you just talk about any changes in expectations heading into this potential heightening-tightening cycle around the pace and cadence of deposit betas?
Yeah. I mean, our expectation is that deposit betas are gonna be. I think the words we used to use were low and lumpy. I think our expectations will be that they'll be similar to what we saw last time. We've no reason to believe that they would be otherwise. As we've been listening to or hearing, you know, monitoring some of the earnings calls from some of the banks, I think that's their expectation as well. That's what we're, you know, we're reflecting, I guess, in our thinking as of now.
Going back to expenses, kind of a near-term, long-term two-part question here, from Bill Katz at Citigroup. In the course of the scenario you outlined, how much potential downside flex could there be if activity levels and engagement were to differ? Then as you think about looking over the horizon towards the long term, how long or how should the community think about the longer-term trajectory and when we might start to approach that mid- to lower-single-digit level of course spending?
Yeah. The downward flex on expenses, I mean, there are a number of expenses that are tied or directly influenced by client engagement levels, whether it's some of the trading expenses that flow through our P&L but are basically pass-through expenses to our clients or some of the capacity that we need, whether it's phone volume, you know, client engagement via the phone channels. You know, we'll certainly make sure that we're adjusting our staffing levels to support the calls that we see. That can certainly, if we see lower engagement levels, one would expect that would be reflected in lower expenses.
In terms of longer-term expense trajectory, you know, I think we've talked about this previously, and we do believe that mid-single digit expense growth is a reasonable expectation over a longer period of time. The numbers are gonna be a little bit different, as we've said, I think. I can't remember which business update it was last year was talking about that. As we go through this integration, this integration is an unusual event that we need to add expense to be able to absorb these accounts. Then once we do that, we can harvest a lot of the expense synergies that come from that. Then once we do that, you know, get back to those more normalized levels of expense growth.
You think about over the last, you know, this last year, what we've experienced. We're experiencing this massive integration, you know, highest inflation that we've had in 40 years, 8% organic growth rate in terms of net new assets and extraordinary client engagement. You know, there's a number of things going on over time that I would hesitate to extrapolate all four of those at the same levels over the next 10 years, let's say.
Transitioning back to the overall kind of liquidity posture, a question from Michael Cyprys at Morgan Stanley. The $11 billion in parent liquidity, you know, seems a bit higher than perhaps we've seen in the past. You may not be able to go into full detail here, Peter, but how would you characterize that in terms of, you know, it's running maybe on the upper bound or this is the new normal or what level of liquidity do you see as a target?
Well, I wouldn't say that there's a target in terms of, you know, the dollar amount of parent liquidity. We wanna make sure we have enough parent liquidity to support the day-to-day cash flow needs of our broker-dealer, which is a function of our clients' trading activity. We also need to have more parent liquidity to support our liquidity coverage ratio. Those are really the two factors that have been driving those dollar liquidity numbers higher. We don't wanna ever be in a position where we don't have enough liquidity to support our clients' activities. It's very important.
You know, this having a very strong, secure, balance sheet is, you know, priority one for us. In the business we often trust, we know how quickly one can lose that trust. We wanna make sure we have sufficient liquidity to be able to support the growth of our business and support our clients.
Great. Thank you very much, Peter. Turn it over to you for any parting comments.
Well, thank you, Jeff. I, you know, as I would say, as we wrap this what now 4.5-hour meeting up, hopefully all of you you've seen all of us here today are I think Jonathan used the word super excited about how the company is performing and about the performance opportunities to better serve our clients and investors more broadly, as well as the prospects for return to a more normal interest rate environment in the quarters, in the years ahead. Rest assured that we're certainly not taking anything for granted. We will continue to focus on clients, continue to build on our strengths and look to the future even as we learn from the past.
Really appreciate your time, and we'll look forward to catching up again in April. Thanks, everyone.