Overview of Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk
This Bloomberg Masters in Business interview features Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of Altruist, a modern custodian built for independent financial advisors. Wenk explains how his background in computer science led him to see wealth management as an outdated, inefficient industry ripe for reinvention through software, automation, and now AI. The conversation focuses on why he believes the legacy custodial model is broken, how Altruist competes with giants like Schwab and Fidelity, and how AI tools like Hazel are intended to lower costs and improve outcomes for both advisors and clients.
Key Themes and Takeaways
From computer science to financial services
- Wenk never planned a finance career; he studied computer science and originally wanted to work in Silicon Valley.
- An internship at Morgan Stanley at 19 exposed him to financial services and helped him understand how technology could improve investing and advice.
- Early work with Morningstar and advisor tools showed him that much of the industry relied on backward-looking, low-quality signals and inefficient workflows.
Why he believed advisory services were broken
- He saw little evidence that stock-picking or market timing consistently improved results.
- He became convinced that:
- low costs matter more than complexity,
- tax efficiency matters,
- and broad access to advice should be internet-enabled and scalable.
- His first business focused on helping people manage 401(k)s online through a subscription model, making advice more accessible to everyday investors.
Building and scaling early businesses
- Wenk built a tech-forward retirement advice business from scratch, including code, proposal systems, and onboarding automation.
- That business scaled to roughly $1.1–$1.2 billion in assets.
- He later turned the process into software for other advisors, which became Formula Folios, a platform that grew rapidly and helped him realize the opportunity was bigger than serving clients one by one.
Why Altruist Exists
The custodial industry is old and inefficient
Wenk argues that the custodial and back-office infrastructure used by advisors is often 50–70 years old and still built around mainframes and manual processes.
Examples of inefficiency he highlighted:
- advisors needing separate portfolio accounting software for basic reporting,
- fee billing workflows that require CSV uploads and third-party reconciliation,
- account opening and transfers that rely on paper forms, signatures, and delays,
- lack of household-level reporting built directly into custodian systems.
His core point: custodians already have the data, so they should be able to automate far more of the experience natively.
A clean-sheet modern custodian
- Altruist was designed from scratch with cloud-native infrastructure, automation, and software integrated directly into the custody stack.
- The company launched in 2020/2021 after code began in 2019.
- Wenk says the company was initially dismissed, but advisors quickly embraced it because they felt the pain of legacy systems directly.
Competitive Strategy Against Schwab, Fidelity, and Others
Why he thought Altruist could win
- The big players are dominant, but not beloved.
- Wenk points to low advisor satisfaction, poor onboarding experiences, and outdated workflows as signs of opportunity.
- He frames the market as a classic disruption setup:
- huge and growing,
- dominated by incumbents,
- built on old infrastructure,
- and underserved by modern technology.
Fractional shares and the economics of “free”
- He argues that “zero commission” trading obscured where custodians actually made money:
- cash balances and net interest income,
- payment for order flow,
- fund revenue sharing,
- and other hidden spreads and incentives.
- Altruist’s approach is to be transparent and optimize for client outcomes, including:
- fractional shares,
- lower idle cash,
- direct securities,
- tax-aware investing,
- and reduced reliance on expensive packaged products.
Business model
- Altruist earns revenue from custody/clearing, net interest income, order routing, and software/services.
- Because the platform bundles multiple functions, it can be 60%–80% cheaper than buying equivalent third-party tools separately.
- Wenk says the company earns more revenue per dollar of assets than other RIAs custodians because it provides more integrated value, while still charging clients less overall.
Hazel: Altruist’s AI Layer
What Hazel is
- Hazel is Altruist’s AI product, tightly integrated with the custody platform but also available independently.
- It is used by financial advisors and also by other firms, including CPA practices.
What it does
Hazel is designed to automate the hardest, most time-consuming parts of advice work:
- gathering client data,
- building financial plans,
- building tax plans,
- handling client communication,
- and helping advisors respond more intelligently and quickly.
Why it matters
- Wenk sees AI as a way to eliminate the traditional tradeoff between:
- serving more clients, or
- serving clients at a high level.
- By reducing the unit cost of complex work to just a few dollars, AI can make high-quality tax and planning services accessible to far more households.
- He believes the future of custody will become increasingly “agentic,” with software agents performing tasks humans currently do manually.
Cybersecurity, Fraud, and Legacy Risk
Security concerns in finance
- Wenk notes that legacy tech stacks create major cybersecurity risks because they are hard to modernize and easier for attackers to exploit.
- He emphasizes that building on modern infrastructure allows for:
- stronger authentication,
- security keys,
- better controls than phone-based verification,
- and AI tools that can detect malicious AI and fraud attempts.
Why modern architecture matters
- He argues that replatforming a giant old custodian is nearly impossible.
- Starting clean means security can be designed into the product rather than patched on afterward.
Capital, Scale, and Long-Term Vision
Fundraising and financial footing
- Altruist has raised a little over $600 million over seven years.
- Wenk says the company is cash-flow positive at the broker-dealer level and does not expect to need more capital.
- The business remains capital intensive because brokerage operations require reserve capital as assets and clients scale.
Market size and growth
- The RIA custodial market is roughly $10 trillion across about 35,000 firms.
- Schwab controls more than half of the market, Fidelity is next, and the rest is fragmented.
- Wenk says Altruist’s growth has been exceptionally fast, with assets scaling faster than several well-known retail investing startups combined in its early years.
Where he thinks it goes
- He expects Altruist to eventually serve multiple trillions in assets and millions of end clients.
- His long-term thesis is that modern tech can unlock enormous consumer value by reducing fees, cash drag, taxes, and friction across the wealth management stack.
Personal Philosophy and Advice
What drives him
- Wenk repeatedly returns to a mission-driven mindset: helping people and improving outcomes.
- He prefers building businesses with “missionaries” rather than “mercenaries.”
- He sees his career as a sequence of solving bigger and bigger problems.
Advice for young people
- Become the most AI-forward person in your field.
- Don’t fear being replaced by AI; fear being replaced by someone who uses AI better than you.
- Seek proximity to high-caliber people early in your career, because that sharpens judgment and accelerates growth.
Notable Books and Influences
- Good to Great by Jim Collins — influential in how he thinks about flywheels and long-term compounding.
- Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark — reflects his interest in AI’s long-term trajectory.
- Seth Godin’s books — helped him develop entrepreneurial soft skills.
Bottom Line
Jason Wenk’s core argument is that wealth management has been held back by legacy infrastructure, hidden economics, and slow innovation. Altruist’s bet is that a modern, software-native custody platform combined with AI can improve advisor productivity, lower costs, and deliver better outcomes for clients at scale. His confidence comes from first-principles thinking: if the industry is still operating like it’s decades old, there is room to rebuild it from scratch.