The decline was offset, however, by fees from managing retail customer assets, like money market funds, and from selling packaged investment products.

Schwab has over $600 billion in customer assets.

The company directly manages $167 billion in customer assets and holds an additional $381 billion in custody, a franchise that no other firm challenges.

Founded in 1955 and incorporated on October 18, 1957 [1], the company manages $364.1 billion dollars of customer assets.

The 2% or 4% capital requirement was solely for customer assets (i.e., amounts owed by customers to the broker-dealer).

Last month, Schwab passed the $100 billion mark in customer assets.

The amount of customer assets at the firm, a key source of recurring revenue, rose 12 percent in the quarter to $423 billion.

The private banking business also reported a net inflow of 1.5 billion Swiss francs ($1.1 billion) in customer assets.

Merrill Lynch oversees a huge pot of customer assets, giving it a large fee income.

The company is now the nation's fourth-largest on-line broker with more than $6 billion in customer assets and 253,000 on-line trading accounts.