硅谷Fintech观察①｜富途 vs Robinhood：解耦已经发生过了Silicon Valley Fintech Watch ① | Futu vs Robinhood: The Decoupling Already Happened

AI is still running white-hot: one day Claude gets its account banned, the next it's standing in the spotlight; the day after it's swearing undying loyalty to Micron and SK Hynix. The forward thrust is still ferocious, and most people are still badly underestimating just how fast AI is accelerating. But fintech, too, is advancing — quietly and methodically.

In brief — Here's a contrast to sit with. Charles Schwab has US$11.77 trillion in client assets under its wing, nearly 75 times Futu's — yet its market cap is only about 13 times Futu's. In this business, market cap never tracks how much money you handle; it tracks how much profit you can pry out of it. Grasp that one sentence and you've grasped the last decade of American brokerage — the decoupling happened long ago, the war is over, and the smart money has already turned its guns elsewhere. This first piece starts with the brokers Chinese readers know best.

Let me open with a question: is Futu really "China's Charles Schwab"?

A few numbers first. As of Q1 2026, Futu has 30.17 million users, 3.59 million funded accounts (+34% year over year), HK$1.22 trillion in total client assets (+47% year over year), and quarterly trading volume of HK$4.15 trillion — an all-time high. Its commission rate is as low as 0.03%, while traditional brokers still charge 0.2%–0.25%. Revenue for the quarter was HK$5.856 billion (+25% year over year), with a gross margin of 87%.

What does 87% mean? That is not a broker's gross margin. That is a software company's gross margin. By Hong Kong equity trading volume, Futu ranks first among the city's digital brokers; its official materials carry a line worth quoting: "One in every two Hong Kong adults uses Futubull." That is not rhetoric — it is penetration.

By any reasonable read, isn't this China's own homegrown Schwab? A world-class broker with 30 million users, trillions in assets, an 87% gross margin, and the trust, private-banking and investment-banking businesses all bolted on?

My answer is: no. And in fact, quite the opposite — the more successful Futu is, the more it proves China can't produce a Stripe.

Why? The argument starts from a counterintuitive fact: over the past decade-plus in the United States, the businesses the new generation of fintech has genuinely "decoupled" and disrupted are almost entirely banks — not brokers, not asset managers. Because the brokerage-and-asset-management war was already fought to a finish in the previous decade. This is the first piece in the series "Why China Can't Produce a Stripe," and I start with brokers and asset managers simply because they are the financial services Chinese readers know best — who hasn't bought a fund or traded a stock? But as we go, you'll find that this familiar terrain is precisely where the fighting is already over.

All figures use the latest Q1 2026 reporting and have been cross-checked. Read on.

I. Who Futu Is: A Broker Built to "Overspec"

Introduce Futu, and most media reach straight for "China's Robinhood." The analogy is convenient, but it badly sells the company short.

What is Robinhood? It began as a retail trading app doing one thing — "letting retail investors trade." Stocks, options, crypto: at bottom, all of it is the trading business. Banking, credit cards, prediction markets — those are lessons it has only been catching up on in the last couple of years (more on that in Section VI). What does Futu set out to do? Let me lay its official business map out for you:

• Brokerage & trading: Hong Kong, US, A-shares (Stock Connect), Japanese, Singaporean, Malaysian and Australian equities all covered — one account, cross-market, no currency conversion. The first broker in Hong Kong to offer 24/5 US-stock trading.
• Wealth management (Money Plus): Launched in 2019, connected to more than 100 fund houses and over 150 funds, with zero subscription/redemption fees on mutual funds and a minimum investment of HK$0.01.
• Investment banking + IPO distribution + corporate services (Futu I&E): Serving over 1,000 corporate clients; having handled IPO distribution and IR for 498 of them, helped 327 list in Hong Kong and the US, and signed 772 ESOP mandates — its client roster includes Meituan, Kuaishou, Xiaomi, Baidu, KE Holdings, JD Health and Bilibili.
• Private wealth: The high-net-worth "1+1+N" model (1 relationship manager + 1 investment advisor + N specialists), plus family trusts, investment immigration and wealth succession.
• Trust: It holds its own Hong Kong trust license. It can close the loop in-house on family trusts — traditionally the province of established private banks.
• Institutional services: Family offices, brokers, EAMs, PE/VC, and insurance asset managers all covered.
• Crypto and tokenization: Holding a Hong Kong virtual-asset (VATP) license, it can conduct crypto business legally, and it is building tokenized money-market funds.

Read that list and you see how inaccurate "China's Robinhood" really is. What Futu wants to do is stuff the jobs of three companies — Charles Schwab (retail brokerage), Morgan Stanley's private bank (high-net-worth), and Carta (equity/ESOP management) — into a single app. One account: from the first lot of shares you buy, to the options your employer grants you, to the family trust you set up once you've grown wealthy — it wants to catch you at every step.

This kind of "full stack" simply doesn't exist in the United States. America is a highly specialized market: brokerage is brokerage, private banking is private banking, equity management is equity management, and each stays in its lane. So how — and why on earth — does Futu insist on building itself into a "super-broker"? Park that question. Its answer is the whole point the piece builds toward.

II. Five Companies, One Table: Sort the Species First

To answer "is Futu China's Schwab," the easiest route is to put it on one table against four American benchmarks — Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity and Interactive Brokers (IBKR). These five are, in fact, five different species within the brokerage business (data as of Q1 2026):

Three contrasts in this table are worth stopping to stare at.

Contrast one: the money handled and the market cap are wildly out of proportion. Schwab handles US$11.77 trillion in client assets, nearly 75 times Futu's — yet its market cap (US$168.7 billion) is only 13 times Futu's (US$13.3 billion). Fidelity, with US$17.9 trillion under administration, is more extreme still — but it's a private company and simply doesn't need a market cap.

This points to a very plain truth: in this business, market cap never tracks how much money you handle; it tracks how much profit you can pry out of that money. Handling trillions at a fee rate of zero is worth far less than handling hundreds of billions and squeezing interest and distribution fees out of every dollar. Hold onto that sentence — it's the key to everything that follows.

Contrast two: "zero commission" is the mantra of four of the five, but it means completely different things. Robinhood, Schwab and Fidelity all charge $0 stock commissions, and IBKR's Lite tier is zero-commission too; only Futu still openly charges 0.03%. But don't blurt out "America is cheaper and more advanced than China" — because in America, "zero commission" is a phrase whose core has been hollowed out. Section III takes that apart in detail.

Contrast three: two ways to wait on the rich. In America, Schwab, Fidelity and — further upmarket — Morgan Stanley serve the high-net-worth crowd through people: financial advisors, private bankers, physical branches, securities-based lending (SBLOC). Morgan Stanley's Liquidity Access Line and Schwab's Pledged Asset Line boil down to "pledge your stock to me and I'll lend you money," at a rate of around 6.75%, and the core selling point is that when markets lurch, a banker can call you to talk it over and give you a 5–7 business-day cushion before a margin call. That is a relationship-driven, heavy private bank.

Futu's "1+1+N" plus its 24/7 asset concierge plus an app is the traditional private bank redone as a productized, lightweight version — serving cross-border Chinese. One is a relationship-driven heavy private bank; the other a product-driven light one. Behind the split lies a difference in how the two customer bases behave.

If I had to place all five in a single line each: Schwab and Fidelity are "the water-and-power utilities of American finance," Robinhood is "the young American's first brokerage account," Futu is "the offshore Chinese diaspora's gateway to finance," and IBKR is "the global professional's electronic trading terminal." They all look like brokers, but the people they serve, the way they make money, and the ground beneath their feet are three entirely different things.

III. The Same "Zero Commission," Two Completely Different Printing Presses

Now to dismantle the single most dangerous misconception in this piece.

Many people have an intuition: American brokers charge "zero commission" = more advanced, more generous to the little guy; Chinese brokers still charging 0.03%–0.2% = more backward, more greedy. That intuition is wrong. Wrong where? Wrong because it fails to see what these brokers actually live on once commissions go to zero.

Take Robinhood first. Its Q1 2026 revenue was US$1.07 billion (+15% year over year), and broken open it's a precision-built "non-commission" printing press:

• Transaction revenue of US$623 million: options US$260 million, equities US$82 million, crypto (once the big line — still US$252 million in Q1 2025) down sharply this quarter, and "other" (mainly prediction markets) up 320% to US$147 million. Note this well: Robinhood's "equity trading revenue" has never come from charging you a commission — it comes from selling your order to market makers (PFOF, payment for order flow).
• Net interest income of US$359 million (+24%): the idle cash in your account, and the margin you borrow (margin balances hit a record US$17 billion this quarter, +93% year over year) — all of it feeds its interest income.
• Other, US$85 million: mostly Robinhood Gold subscriptions; subscription revenue was US$50 million this quarter, with 4.3 million Gold subscribers (+36%).

In plain terms: on the surface Robinhood is "zero commission, I don't charge you a thing" — but in reality it rakes the money back, layer by layer, from your order flow, your idle cash, your leverage, your subscription fees. Its ARPU (revenue per user, estimated) is about US$157 and still climbing. Zero commission isn't charity; it's moving the tollbooth from "the commission you can see" to "the places you can't."

Schwab has taken this to grandmaster level. Its Q1 2026 revenue was US$6.48 billion, with net interest income accounting for roughly half — because Schwab is, at bottom, a bank. Park your money there and it uses cash sweep to shuttle your idle cash into its own bank to earn the spread; bank loan balances stand at US$60.9 billion (+29%) and margin balances at a staggering US$126.7 billion. The rest comes from advisory and management fees (management fees of US$1.8 billion this quarter, +15%; Schwab Wealth Advisory posted a record US$10 billion in net inflows for the quarter).

Schwab was the first to cut stock commissions to zero, in October 2019. Why did it dare? Because it had already worked out the math: use zero commission to pull in clients and their money, then monetize through the two real printing presses — net interest income and management fees. For Schwab, the commission was only ever bait on the hook, never the profit itself.

Fidelity runs a different playbook again. It's a private company (the Johnson family has held it for nearly 80 years), doesn't disclose quarterly profits, but its business model is plain as day: use zero commissions — even zero-fee index funds (it has products like FZROX with a 0% management fee) — to pull in enormous sums, then make its real money as the asset manager collecting fund fees, and as the custodian reaping scale dividends from 401(k) (US corporate retirement) plans. Fidelity has US$17.9 trillion under administration and around US$6.8 trillion under discretionary management, making it the fourth-largest asset management force in the world and one of the top two in the US (only BlackRock, Vanguard and UBS sit above it). It has even issued its own stablecoin (Fidelity Digital Dollar). The "free" Fidelity sells you is meant to get you to move your retirement savings — your whole family's money — into its ecosystem, and then earn the long money, slowly, from the asset-management end.

Now turn back to Futu. It has no zero commission; it charges 0.03%. But its revenue mix tells you it's doing a different version of the very same thing as these American players. Futu, Q1 2026: commissions HK$2.64 billion, interest HK$2.65 billion, other (wealth + corporate services) HK$560 million. Look closely — interest is already neck-and-neck with commissions, and in fact slightly ahead. Where does the interest come from? Margin lending, and the spread on cross-border funds. Where does "other" come from? Wealth-product distribution and ESOP corporate services.

So the truth is this: across all five companies, whether or not they charge that sliver of commission, the real printing press is never the commission — it's net interest income, securities lending, asset-management and distribution fees, and subscriptions. Commission has long since slipped into the back seat on everyone's books. Robinhood and Schwab dare cut commissions to zero because their net-interest-income machine is big enough to cover the shortfall; Futu keeps its 0.03%, but its interest income has already caught up with commissions.

This is the first layer of what the title means by "decoupling": the commission — the broker's oldest way of charging you — has already been pried out of the brokerage business model. Brokers no longer live on "I take a cut every time you trade"; they live on the assets sitting in your account, the money you borrow, and the products you buy. America has done this most thoroughly, and Futu has done a good chunk of it too.

IV. In America, the Decoupling War Was Fought to a Finish Long Ago

Decoupling the commission is only the first layer. Over the past decade-plus, American brokerage and asset management went through a far more thorough, far more systematic decoupling movement. It came in four steps, and each step tore out one more layer of fees from traditional financial services.

Layer one: Robinhood pried out the commission. This is the most famous step. Founded in 2013, Robinhood's "permanently zero commission" forced the whole industry to follow suit in 2019. But as noted, what it really did was not abolish the toll but relocate it to PFOF + net interest income. The commission's skin got torn off, and brokers kept making money all the same — which proves precisely that the commission was always something you could pry out.

Layer two: robo-advisors pried out the advisor's 1%. Traditionally, to do asset allocation you had to hire a financial advisor and hand over roughly 1% of your assets a year. Robo-advisors like Betterment and Wealthfront said: allocation is fundamentally an algorithm, no human required — we'll auto-diversify and auto-run tax-loss harvesting for you, and charge just 0.25%. Most of that 1% "human fee" got pried away by the algorithm.

Layer three: Vanguard and index funds — a more fundamental decoupling in itself. An actively managed fund sells you the promise "I can beat the market" (alpha) and charges a high management fee for it. Vanguard flipped the table with index funds: the vast majority of active funds don't beat the market over the long run, so I won't sell you the promise of alpha at all — I'll sell only the cheapest beta, tracking the market as closely as possible. It stripped the "beat the market" promise out of the product and left only low-cost market exposure. Today Vanguard manages roughly US$12 trillion, and its S&P 500 ETF (VOO) is the largest ETF in the world. Once the fee on an S&P 500 fund gets bid down to 0.03%, how much meat is left on that bone?

Layer four: direct indexing wants to pry off even the "fund" wrapper. The newest play is: you no longer buy an S&P 500 fund — I directly hold, on your behalf, fractional slices of all 500 stocks in proportion, so you can do finer-grained personalized tax optimization and customization. This tears off the "fund" packaging itself, letting you hold the underlying assets directly.

Stack all four layers together and the conclusion is clear: the "disruption" of American brokerage and asset management is the story of the previous decade, and it's basically done. The commission is pried out, the advisor fee is pried out, the promise of alpha is pried out, and even the fund wrapper is being pried off. Pry it all the way down and the fee rate trends toward zero.

That leaves founders with a particularly brutal reality: in America today, you can no longer build an independent large broker or large asset manager. Why? The core product of asset management has long since become a "standardized commodity" — an S&P 500 fund from Vanguard, Schwab, Fidelity or BlackRock is, to you, all but indistinguishable, and these giants are giving it away at near-zero prices (Fidelity flatly offers 0-fee versions). You can't go steal a share of an S&P fund that's already free. And the parts that can still make money — net interest income, securities lending — happen to be games of scale and distribution: you need Schwab-scale client deposits, its enormous bank license and branch network, to make the spread work. A new entrant can't grab the free products and can't reach the profits that require scale — so it has no road forward.

So now you understand — and mark this sentence — almost no new-generation American fintech founder touches brokerage or asset management anymore. That war is over here. They've turned their guns around and are all going after banks. Because the bank fee pool (payments, card interchange, lending, net interest income, cross-border remittance) is large and fragmented, the old experience is bad, and it has barely been pried apart at all. That's the subject of my next piece, "Why Everyone Goes After Banks."

V. Playing Devil's Advocate: Doesn't Futu Mean "China Produced a Schwab"?

By now a sharp objection should be rising: you've spent all these pages proving how formidable Futu is — 30 million users, trillions in assets, an 87% gross margin, trust and private banking and investment banking all in place — so doesn't that show China has already grown its own Schwab, its own world-class broker? Won't the very first piece of "China Can't Produce a Stripe" be contradicted by Futu itself?

This is the question worth pressing hardest. My answer: quite the opposite. Futu is not a counterexample — Futu is the most powerful example for the thesis. But to see that, you have to look at where its growth engine is actually rooted.

First, Futu's engine is offshore, not on the mainland. Futu's current surge rests on Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the US, Canada and Australia. "One in every two Singaporean adults uses moomoo," Malaysian users past the million mark, the most tradable US stocks in Japan — its client assets can grow 47% year over year because of internationalization, not the mainland. Its headquarters and principal licensed entity are in Hong Kong; the official figure is more than 100 licenses, registrations and qualifications globally. This is a company that has bet its entire existence on "cross-border."

Second, its mainland base is being actively wound down. As of Q1 2026, mainland-based funded clients account for about 13% of Futu's clients, about 17% of assets, and about 20% of revenue. In May 2026, regulators made an industry-wide rule change to cross-border securities business for mainland investors, and Futu was pre-assessed a penalty of RMB 1.85 billion (RMB 470 million in disgorgement + RMB 1.38 billion in fines) and entered a two-year rectification period: a full stop to onboarding clients with mainland ID, restrictions on domestic funding for purchases, and a gradual wind-down of existing clients. Put plainly, the cross-border mainland business Futu was built on is being structurally shut off.

Put the two together and the conclusion is very clear: Futu is not "China growing a Schwab on the mainland." It is "a group of Chinese people who set up headquarters in Hong Kong, staked their growth offshore, and — by serving the global cross-border Chinese diaspora — grew a global broker." The very best part of Futu is precisely what it achieved by running outside the mainland's financial structure.

This is the core of what the series wants to say: China of course has world-class fintech talent and product capability — Futu proves it. But mainland China's financial structure itself has not been decoupled at all. Mainland brokerage commissions, asset-management fee rates and distribution channels are still held firmly in the hands of licensed traditional institutions and the system behind them; for a startup to redo the broker on the mainland, cut fees to zero, and stitch together investment banking, private banking and trust into a full stack — there's almost no chance. Futu could pull all this off because it chose a battlefield where the rules are different: Hong Kong and overseas. It voted with its feet.

VI. Where the Five Are Headed: Robinhood Is Becoming the Very Thing It Set Out to Kill

With the present laid out, this section looks at where each of the five is headed and where the imagination lies. It also plants a few threads for the rest of the series.

Start with Robinhood — it's the most dramatic. Its early stigma, nailed to the pillory, was "gamified casino" — making money off the cyclical mania of retail investors trading meme stocks and coins. Over the last couple of years it has been systematically peeling off that label, but the way it peels is telling: it's not becoming more of a broker — it's becoming more of a bank, more of an everything platform. Lay out its moves over the past 18 months and you see a company expanding along three lines at once, each of which crosses the boundary of "brokerage":

Line one: toward banking. In September 2025 it selected Stakk as a key supplier of its core banking capabilities; in November it partnered with GoPuff and Coastal Community Bank to embed cash delivery and formally launched Robinhood Banking — deposits crossed US$1 billion soon after going live. It offers 4%–5% high-yield savings accounts and match bonuses of 2%+ on newly transferred funds. Crowdfund Insider's framing: "subsidizing rates with revenue from other business lines, using high yield as a customer-acquisition loss-leader." In plain terms: it takes the money it earns from brokerage and subscriptions and uses it to grab the deposits that Bank of America pays savers a mere 0.01% on.

Line two: issuing a credit card. The Robinhood Gold Card, aimed at Gold subscribers, has a stainless-steel body, unlimited 3% cash back on all spending (most mid-market cash-back cards cap out at 2%), and no annual fee. By the end of 2025 there were about 600,000 cardholders, and early users' annualized spend had already blown past US$10 billion. A Motley Fool headline caught it perfectly: "Did Robinhood Just Say 'Checkmate' to American Express?"

Line three: betting on prediction markets. This is the hottest and most divisive corner of Wall Street right now. Robinhood launched "event contracts" in 2025, letting users bet on the outcomes of elections, economic data and sporting events; quarterly revenue has already topped US$100 million. In the latest quarter's transaction revenue, "other" (mainly this) surged 320% year over year to US$147 million — the fastest-growing part of the entire trading segment. CB Insights ranks prediction markets as the "highest-momentum fintech sub-sector" of 2026, with equity funding up 35x year over year in 2025.

How does Wall Street view this "super-app" strategy? The split is enormous — and the fault line is exactly the subject of this article.

The bulls' case, in two words: re-classification. Several institutions have upgraded Robinhood from a "cyclical broker" to a "tech platform," with a consensus "strong buy" in early 2026. The rationale: Gold subscriptions (4.3 million subscribers, +36%) bring stickiness and recurring revenue, transforming it from a trading-dependent cyclical into a three-legged platform: net interest income + subscriptions + trading. The bulls' favorite is the phrase Vlad Tenev keeps repeating — "the Great Wealth Transfer": the boomers' money is passing to millennials and Gen Z, and Robinhood wants to be the default account that catches that money for this cohort. That claim got its hardest confirmation on July 4, 2026: "Trump Accounts," which pre-fund US$1,000 for every American child born from 2025 to 2028 and by default buy an S&P 500 ETF, formally launched — and the government put that account on Robinhood, with over 6 million already opened at launch. Its customer from day one of life; with "the Great Wealth Transfer," it has now locked up even the starting line. It even had its in-house venture fund invest US$75 million in OpenAI, as if terrified anyone might still think it's "just a broker."

The bears' case fixes on the color underneath all this expansion. A Motley Fool analysis put it bluntly: Robinhood has built a pile of new products, but "the vast majority of its money still comes from fees and interest on trading and margin lending — in other words, its business is still built on speculation. And prediction markets simply open a new channel for speculation." Worse, the old affliction of cyclicality is entirely unsolved: in Q1 2026, its crypto trading revenue collapsed about 47% year over year, dragging both quarterly revenue and transaction revenue below expectations and sending the stock down as much as 27% at one point during the year. Goldman Sachs and Bank of America both cut price targets after earnings, for the same reason: however fancy the new story, the moment markets cool and coins drop, your profits show their true colors instantly. And a regulatory sword hangs overhead — in April 2026 the New York Attorney General sued Coinbase and Gemini, alleging their prediction markets "constitute illegal gambling," and the market widely expects Robinhood's equivalent products to eventually face the same reckoning: is this a financial hedging tool, or gambling in disguise?

Put the bull and bear cases side by side and you can draw a conclusion that matters a great deal to this series: Robinhood's "super-app" dream is, at bottom, a journey of reversal. It rose on decoupling — tearing the layer of commission off the broker's back; today it's doing the opposite, re-coupling banking, credit cards, savings and lending — services once scattered everywhere — back into this one app. It wants to go from "the young person's first brokerage account" to "the young person's primary bank." Put plainly, it's straining to grow into the very kind of everything-financial institution it once set out to kill — only this time it wants to redo the bank from the consumer side, from the young-people end.

Those five words — redo the bank — are the perfect trailer for the next piece. So what about Futu? Here are three takeaways, each worth chewing on:

One: the "super app" is not a China-specific obsession; it's the common destiny of any high-stickiness financial platform. Futu was full-stack from day one — trading, wealth, ESOP, private banking, trust, all of it; Robinhood started from a single point (zero-commission trading) and is now, step by step, assembling itself into a full stack too. The two set out from opposite starting points and are converging on the same form. That tells you Futu's "super-broker" is no China-specific mutant — it's in line with the evolutionary direction of financial platforms. The only difference is that Futu built the whole building at once, while Robinhood adds one floor at a time.

Two: the real moat isn't trading — it's subscriptions and asset accumulation. Robinhood got repriced by Wall Street, upgraded from cyclical to tech platform, not on trading volume but on recurring revenue like Gold subscriptions and long-term asset accumulation like retirement accounts and wealth management. Futu's counterpart is its wealth-management AUM and interest income — this quarter's interest (HK$2.65 billion) has already caught up with commissions, and that's precisely the key to whether its valuation can shed the "China-concept cyclical" label. Whoever can shift revenue from "trading that rises and falls with the market" to "subscriptions and interest that come rain or shine" is the one who deserves a tech-stock valuation.

Three, and most crucial: Robinhood redoes the bank on its home turf in America; Futu wants to do something similar but lacks the same soil. Robinhood can issue a credit card, offer high-yield savings and launch prediction markets because America has a mature card network, has partners like Coastal Community Bank willing to be the "bank behind the curtain," and has (contested but existent) regulatory room for prediction markets. Would Futu want to replicate "redoing the bank's consumer side" on the mainland? Almost no chance — mainland payments are locked down by WeChat Pay and Alipay, banking licenses are walled off, and none of these doors open to a broker-born company. So Futu's only viable direction of expansion is "crypto + tokenization + cross-border wealth," seeking new frontiers offshore and on-chain, rather than marching openly into the bank's heartland the way Robinhood does. Both want to be a super app, but Robinhood pushes into the depth of the bank fee pool while Futu is structurally barred at the door of banking. That difference is a microcosm of the very question the whole series ends on.

The remaining three, each in a line of character:

Schwab: grind with scale, then climb slowly. The most "boring" and steadiest of the five. Q1 2026 net income of US$2.5 billion (+30%), core net new assets of US$140 billion, 1.3 million new accounts, and a record 9.9 million daily average trades. Its story isn't disruption — it's using the scale bought with TD Ameritrade (the ~US$26 billion acquisition completed in 2020) to make the two printing presses of net interest income and management fees ever bigger. Its incremental imagination runs in three directions: AI (it has launched the retail generative tool Portfolio Insights and plans an Investor AI assistant), spot crypto (rolling out Bitcoin and Ethereum in phases), and private markets (it acquired Forge Global in early 2026 to add the "let retail touch private markets" layer). The classic giant's playbook: don't chase the hot trend — wait until it's validated, then swallow it with scale. This is a direct extension of the earlier logic: in a track that's already decoupled, the winner is the incumbent giant with scale, not the new entrant.

Fidelity: a private company's long-termism. Not listed, so it doesn't have to dance for quarterly reports and can bet on the longest horizons. It runs the largest 401(k) retirement pool in America — a moat others struggle to shake; it pushes 0-fee funds (FZROX) to take money-gathering to the extreme; and in February 2026 it issued its own stablecoin, the Fidelity Digital Dollar — a nearly 80-year-old asset manager walking, of its own accord, onto the chain. It represents a special kind of presence in the American financial system: on the strength of asset management, a long-lived business, it can stay private, unbound by quarterly profits, and quietly build itself into a US$17.9 trillion behemoth. This kind of "private giant" barely exists in China's financial system.

IBKR: quietly earning the thickest margins. The least known to the public of the five, yet the most profitable. Q1 2026 revenue of US$1.67 billion, with a pre-tax margin as high as 77% — a figure that leaves everyone else in the dust. It doesn't fight for retail traffic; it builds a global electronic pipe for professional traders, RIAs and hedge funds: one account connected directly to dozens of countries' markets and dozens of currencies, client equity of US$789.4 billion, 4.75 million client accounts (+31%). Its printing press shares Schwab's source — net interest income (US$169 billion in idle client cash) as the big part, commissions as the supplement — only it has taken the engineer's path of "low cost + global access" to the extreme. It is the sharpest footnote to this whole logic: once a track is decoupled, the ones who live best are either the giants with scale, or the "pickaxe sellers" who take one link's efficiency to an absurdly high margin — and IBKR touches both.

As for Futu's own future, half is certain and half hangs in the balance. The certain half is internationalization: a full-year target of 800,000 net new funded accounts, almost entirely from overseas, with management stating outright that the mainland penalty won't affect this goal. The new frontier is crypto and tokenization — with the VATP license in hand, it has launched a tokenized money-market fund with ChinaAMC (HK), and is exploring on-chain 24/7 trading and buying stocks with stablecoins, aiming to stake out a spot in the new paradigm of RWA (real-world asset tokenization). But its ceiling is equally clear: its growth is fundamentally tied to the structural arbitrage of "cross-border" — and cross-border is precisely the zone regulators watch most closely and tighten most easily. The RMB 1.85 billion fine and the mainland wind-down are that ceiling showing itself for the first time.

VII. Closing: After the Decoupling, Who Do They Go After?

Three sentences to close this first piece.

First, the decoupling of American brokerage and asset management is already finished. The commission was pried out by Robinhood, the advisor fee by robo-advisors, alpha by index funds, and the fund wrapper by direct indexing. Pried all the way down, the fee rate trends toward zero. The disruption of this track is past tense, not future tense — you can't go steal a share of a 0.03% S&P fund, and you can't, in a landscape where giants give the product away for free and monopolize the scale-driven profits, build another independent large broker.

Second, mainland China's brokerage and asset-management structure has not been decoupled; and China's most successful brokerage innovation — Futu — pulled it off only by running offshore. Its full stack, its 87% gross margin, its trillions in assets are all built on the structural choice of "cross-border." It is not a Schwab grown on the mainland; it is a global broker grown by a group of Chinese people in Hong Kong and overseas. The mainland structure itself hasn't budged an inch.

Third, and most important: when a crowd of the smartest money discovers that the brokerage-and-asset-management track has already been pried clean, with no meat left to cut, where does it go?

The answer is banks. Because the bank fee pool is large and fragmented — payments, card interchange, lending, net interest income, cross-border remittance — each of these is a billion-dollar-scale wedge in America; and the bank's old experience is the worst, its openings the most numerous. Stripe cuts into payments, Wise into remittance, Affirm and SoFi into lending, Chime into deposits, Brex and Ramp into corporate cards — the most surging wave of American fintech entrepreneurship this decade has poured, almost in its entirety, into the bank fee pool.

Why does everyone go after banks? That's the subject of my next piece. And when I unfold that "map of the bank fee pool," you'll see a truth even more counterintuitive than "everyone is going after banks" — most of the star companies that went after the bank's consumer side ended up doing rather poorly; the ones who truly rode through the cycles and quietly made the big money were another crowd, the "pickaxe sellers."

That, right there, is one step closer to the ultimate question of "why China can't produce a Stripe."

(Data in this article is as of Q1 2026, drawn from company earnings reports, SEC filings and public disclosures; the description of Futu's businesses draws in part on its official company materials. Market caps are as of the 2026-07-06 close, with IBKR taken on a fully diluted basis (including unlisted equity); its listed-only market cap is around US$40-odd billion. The next three pieces in this series cover, in order: the map of the bank fee pool, the three payment-infrastructure giants selling pickaxes, and the fundamental difference in the soil between China and the US.)