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Americans give over $600 billion a year to charity. Almost none of it flows through the institutions that hold their assets. That is about to change.
Americans gave $617.2 billion to charity in 2025, according to the Giving USA 2026 report. That is the highest figure ever recorded, up 5.7% from the prior year, and the first time the number has crossed $600 billion.
Most of that money did not flow through a financial institution's platform. It moved via checks, credit card donations, text-to-give campaigns, workplace payroll deductions, and direct bank transfers initiated outside any wealth or banking application. The institutions holding trillions in client assets played almost no role in facilitating the transaction.
That disconnect is the giving gap. And it is not an accident.
The US wealth management industry manages $27.7 trillion in client assets, according to Axis Intelligence. Community banks alone hold roughly $5.7 trillion across nearly 4,000 institutions, per FDIC data. These are the platforms where Americans manage their financial lives: checking accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement funds, advisory relationships.
When those same Americans decide to give to charity, they leave. They open a new tab, visit a nonprofit's website, and enter their credit card number. Or they write a check. Or they set up a recurring donation through a third-party platform that has no connection to the institution holding their assets.
The institution never sees the transaction. It does not appear in the client's account activity. It generates no fee revenue. It creates no data for the advisor. The giving relationship exists entirely outside the platform.
There is one notable exception. Fidelity Charitable, the donor-advised fund arm of Fidelity Investments, granted $18.3 billion to charities in 2025 and manages roughly $86 billion in assets. It has surpassed the Gates Foundation as the largest grantmaker in the country. Schwab Charitable crossed $10 billion in annual grants the same year. Vanguard Charitable distributed $3.9 billion.
These three firms proved something important: when you embed charitable giving inside a financial platform, people use it. The total DAF market now holds $328 billion in assets, according to the DAF Research Collaborative, with contributions of $90.6 billion in the most recent fiscal year alone.
But DAFs are products built for high-net-worth clients at large brokerage firms. They require minimum contributions, often $5,000 or more. They involve a separate account structure. And they are proprietary to the firms that built them.
Community banks, regional wealth managers, credit unions, and investment firms outside the Fidelity-Schwab-Vanguard triad have no equivalent. Their clients give to charity at the same rates as everyone else. The institution just never participates.
Building embedded charitable giving is harder than it looks. The institution needs to verify that a charity is legitimate (IRS 501(c)(3) status, OFAC screening). It needs safeguards to prevent erroneous transfers. It needs a ledger that auditors can verify. It needs to originate ACH transfers to potentially thousands of recipient organizations. And it needs all of this to work inside its existing app, under its existing authentication, without taking custody of donor funds.
No individual community bank or midsize wealth manager has the engineering budget to build that stack. The compliance surface alone would consume their entire technology team for a year.
That is why the gap persists. The demand exists. The assets are there. The infrastructure to connect them has not been.
Individuals gave $394.2 billion to charity in 2025. DAF grants accounted for roughly $55 billion of total giving, or about 9%. The remaining 91% flowed through channels that had no connection to a financial institution's platform.
If even 10% of individual giving moved through the institutions where those individuals already manage their money, that represents $39 billion in annual transaction volume. At a platform fee shared between the institution and the infrastructure provider, that is a meaningful revenue line for institutions of any size.
A community bank with $2 billion in deposits does not need high adoption rates to see meaningful fee-share revenue from embedded giving. And unlike a DAF program, there is no fund to manage and no dedicated staff to hire.
The most immediate change is visibility. The institution captures a transaction it was previously invisible to. Every gift generates a fee-share, an audit record, and a data point the advisor can reference in their next conversation. Giving that used to happen entirely outside the platform now runs through it.
The less obvious change is stickiness. Giving is personal and long-horizon. A client who designates recurring charitable gifts through their bank is less likely to move their accounts. The Fidelity and Schwab DAF retention numbers bear this out: these are among the stickiest products either firm offers. Embedded giving creates the same dynamic without requiring a separate account or a minimum contribution.
For firms facing ESG reporting requirements or client demand for impact data, there is a third benefit: an auditable record of client philanthropy. An append-only ledger of verified charitable distributions is the most concrete ESG signal an institution can produce.
The $617 billion giving market is not underserved because people do not want to give. It is underserved because the infrastructure to give through a financial institution has only existed at the largest brokerage firms, locked inside proprietary DAF products.
That is the gap GivEZ was built to close. One integration, any core banking system, and the institution's clients can designate gifts from the accounts they already hold. The institution originates every transfer on its own rails. GivEZ handles allocation, safeguards, and the ledger.
The infrastructure to close this gap exists. If your institution holds client assets and your clients give to charity, we should talk.
Research and perspectives on embedded giving, delivered when we publish.
