Altruist: Transforming Wealth Management

In a rapidly evolving wealth management landscape, where traditional custodial models have become increasingly complex and costly for independent Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), the ability to deliver comprehensive financial services through streamlined, technologically advanced platforms has become essential for growth and client satisfaction. Altruist is addressing the fundamental operational inefficiency challenges facing advisors through a verticalized software stack, best-of-breed plugins for RIAs’ scaling needs and most critically, a robust custodial infrastructure that is built for the 21st century. Geodesic Capital is excited to partner with Altruist on its goal to become the next-generation custodial platform for wealth management.

The Evolving Wealth Management Landscape

The wealth management industry is undergoing significant structural changes that create fertile ground for innovative players like Altruist. The U.S. independent and hybrid RIA market experienced steady growth over the last decade, expanding at a high single-digit CAGR to approximately $9 trillion today, with projections suggesting continued growth to $11 trillion by 2027. 

This growth is being driven by several key factors. 

1. First, there is a wealth transfer happening from the “Boomers” to the next generation and when coupled with long-term economic growth, the overall pool of investable wealth is increasing. 
2. Second, we are witnessing a pronounced trend of advisors “breaking away” from large traditional managers such as wirehouses to establish their own RIAs, seeking greater autonomy and improved economics. 
3. Third, RIAs are gaining market share among financial advisory firms due to their high-touch service model, comprehensive solutions, and fiduciary alignment with clients.

In conjunction with this growth, the RIA market remains ripe for disruption. The industry is highly fragmented and served by outdated technology and siloed solutions. The dominant legacy custodians—Charles Schwab and Fidelity—operate with legacy infrastructure that creates inefficiencies, high costs, and suboptimal client experiences. RIAs typically must integrate multiple third-party software solutions for essential functions like portfolio management, trading, reporting, and client onboarding, resulting in complex workflows and elevated costs.

Altruist’s vertically integrated approach directly addresses these pain points. By combining custody services with front/middle/back-office tools at a fraction of the cost of assembling similar capabilities from legacy providers and third parties, Altruist offers a compelling value proposition that resonates strongly with forward-thinking RIAs.

Leadership Team with Deep Wealth Management Expertise

Tackling a deep-rooted and complex industry demands a leadership team that brings exceptional experience and domain expertise. Founder and CEO Jason Wenk demonstrates “n of 1” founder-product-market fit, with deep capital markets expertise and product insight. His over 20 years of wealth management experience includes founding and successfully scaling two wealth management companies: Retirement Wealth, which grew to $100 million in total AUM, and FormulaFolios, which reached $3.6 billion in organic total AUM in just six years.

He is joined by seasoned executives such as CRO Rich Rao (Google/Intuit), CTO Sumanth Sukumar (Coinbase/Uber/Meta), CFO Marc Greenberg (Blend), CPO Harpreet Ahluwalia (ServiceTitan/Salesforce) and COO Mazi Bahadori (Aspiration/PIMCO). Rich’s background in scaling Google Workspace products in both product-led and sales-led growth from 0 to $1B is a rarity. Harpreet’s product experience in building ServiceTitan’s platform to serve a swath of trades, and Sumanth’s extensive “engineering for scale” roles are yet other examples of the organization’s collective bench strength to scale Altruist for its next phase of growth. 

Vertical Integration Offers Competitive Advantage 

Altruist’s most significant innovation is its vertical integration of the entire wealth management technology stack. By seamlessly integrating custody services, asset management platforms, practice management software, and client acquisition tools, Altruist delivers substantial cost savings and operational efficiencies for RIAs. 

This integrated approach yields multiple competitive advantages:

1. Digital-First Experience: Unlike legacy platforms that rely on paper-based processes, Altruist provides fully digital account opening services in under 5 minutes, automated rebalancing, and modern client portals. This streamlined experience reduces labor costs by 40-60% and significantly improves client satisfaction.
2. Unified Technology Stack: Altruist integrates natively with essential tools like Redtail, MoneyGuide, and Morningstar, eliminating the data reconciliation challenges that plague RIAs using legacy systems. This integration reduces administrative burdens and allows advisors to focus on client relationships. 
3. Product Iteration: Being a digital native platform allows Altruist to real-time track and get feedback on how their features are being utilized and their importance, respectively. This allows for a rapid iteration and velocity of feature development. 
4. Cost Efficiency: For customers of a certain scale, Altruist offers free software, a dramatically different approach than the traditional providers. The platform eliminates the need for multiple third-party solutions, reducing software costs by 90-95% and portfolio management costs by 50-80%.
5. Aligned Incentives: Unlike Schwab and Fidelity, which increasingly compete with RIAs (including their own custodial customers) by offering direct retail services, Altruist operates exclusively for RIAs, ensuring complete alignment with their business goals.

In the AI age, we currently believe that moats are increasingly converging to be both data and dexterity. Altruist’s product dexterity is complemented by a growing underlying data moat that allows the launch of AI features. The opportunity for Altruist mirrors the historical trajectory of TD Ameritrade, which built its business by initially focusing on smaller RIAs before expanding upmarket. Altruist is already demonstrating this pattern and is serving RIAs of varied scale. 

Altruist represents a reimagination of an age-old industry that has resigned itself to incumbent offerings. Beyond the vertical integration approach, being a custodian itself allows Altruist to “manufacture” products that sophisticated RIAs need and emerging RIAs would eventually grow into. The combination of a digital-first, unified product stack, with breadth and depth of leadership to cater for a wide-ranging set of RIAs, positions Altruist as a future leader. 

Geodesic Capital is thrilled to partner with Jason and the team at Altruist, to bring wealth management into the AI age.