I'm excited to share the news of Altruist’s Series D fundraise, a $112 million round led by Insight Partners and Adams Street that brings our total funding to approximately $290 million. This announcement comes on the heels of our acquisition of renowned custodial platform Shareholders Service Group, and the launch of our self-clearing custodian, which together will cement our position as the third-largest custodian by the number of firms served.
We're extremely grateful to the thousands of RIAs who have placed their trust in Altruist. 2023 is shaping up to be another year of banner growth, and I couldn’t be more energized by what we’re working towards. But when it comes to making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to everyone, we’ve only just scratched the surface. To help RIAs provide great, independent financial advice to more people, we need to be able to serve a broader segment of the RIA market.
With this capital, we’re accelerating product development to ensure that Altruist can empower RIAs of any size and scale.
Surpassing the $100M AUM milestone is no easy feat. You have to establish internal processes, nurture client relationships, differentiate your marketing, hire quality talent, manage firm operations, foster a team culture – the list goes on. Even when my first company, Retirement Wealth, had 100 financial advisors and over $1.8B in AUM, an enormous amount of capacity was wasted each week on low-value tasks, manual data entry, and call center support. I would’ve much rather seen the team spend this time deepening client relationships and growing the firm.
Twenty years later, you’d expect to see some changes. Unfortunately, given their dominant position (and the cost of innovation), legacy custodians have little incentive to digitize processes, harness the power of data, and develop applications that would enable advisors to do more with less.
We’re taking these learnings and building a modern alternative to the Big 3 that can empower RIAs at any scale. Whether you’re managing $1M or $1B, Altruist will help you save time, reduce costs, and grow faster. To do this, we are expanding product capabilities in three key areas: automation, personalization, and integration.
Automation helps firms offload low-value work and free up team capacity.
Where tasks like account opening, funding, and transfers used to take days, they now take just a few minutes, saving time for both advisors and clients. The automation built into the Altruist platform has been especially beneficial for fast-growing firms like Beck Bode – a company with over 30 employees and 3 acquisitions in the past 10 years.
“My team no longer has to be spending their time on ACHs and filing paperwork. We don’t need three people to touch a trust document. The more capacity Altruist gives my people, the more good they can do.”
– Ben Beck, Beck Bode
In the coming months, we plan on bringing an equally impactful level of automation to portfolio management. Through enhancements to our rebalancer, and the addition of new cash and tax management functionality, firms will be able to drive better outcomes for more clients in less time.
RIAs need to be able to deliver personalization at scale.
A great client experience sets the fastest-growing firms apart from the rest. It starts with understanding the complex and evolving blend of behavioral, personal, and financial data and then tailoring the advisory experience in such a way that there’s a clear connection between goals, strategy, and reality.
From the initial launch of our product, we have provided advisors with access to commission-free fractional share trading – and more recently UMAs – giving firms the flexibility to create bespoke portfolios regardless of account size. Combine that with flexible billing arrangements, and firms like Kiplinger Wealth Advisors are now able to bring on a more diverse clientele they would’ve otherwise been unable to serve.
After the Kiplinger team moved approximately $100M over to Altruist last year, they shared how the technology has expanded their target market.
“Before [Altruist], we weren’t able to profit on an account with less than $15k, but with the billing flexibility and massively reduced costs for the tech, that’s no longer the case.”
– Tyler Purcell, Kiplinger Wealth Advisors
In 2023, we’ll be expanding the list of available account types, enhancing our direct indexing functionality, integrating new asset classes, onboarding more providers to our model marketplace, and deploying highly requested functionality around security exclusions and heldaway accounts. All in service of helping advisors craft more personalized solutions for their clients, with ease.
Stronger integrations simplify workflows for RIAs.
We have incredible partners in Wealthbox and Right Capital – two fintech solutions making substantial improvements to the RIA technology landscape. By seamlessly connecting CRM and Financial Planning with account opening, funding, trading, reporting, and billing, advisors are able to spend less time on data reconciliation and build stronger relationships with a 360 degree view of their clients.
In addition to deepening our connections with current partners, we’ll be building a suite of integrations with widely used portfolio reporting tools, and extending the capabilities of our recently launched Open API so that teams with development resources can customize solutions as they see fit. By strengthening the connective tissue across critical tools, we can drastically lower costs for scaling firms.
A modern custodian built exclusively for RIAs
We are aggressively pursuing a product roadmap that helps independent advisors spend more time on the work that matters most: developing client relationships and growing their firms. By putting fast, intuitive technology into workflows where it has the highest impact, we can help teams reclaim precious time and capital. This next stage of product development will help us serve more firms like Root Financial, who are on a growth trajectory to hit the $1B AUM milestone.
“As a partner, Altruist allows us to continue growing like crazy. It cuts down hours and effort, simplifies training and workflows, and reduces the complexities of scaling.”
– James Conole, Root Financial
To build a modern custodian, we needed to create an alternative to the Big 3 that was digital, vertically integrated, and focused exclusively on RIAs. With this round of funding, we’re better positioned than ever to set a new standard of service and technology for independent advisors and their clients. And we’re just getting started.
If you’re interested in learning more about Altruist, please get in touch with our team.
The above testimonials were given by current clients or investors. Neither Altruist nor its affiliates paid for these testimonials, but we do earn revenue from advisors and on assets in accounts. As of the date of these testimonials, the promoting advisors (B. Beck, T. Purcell, J. Conole) received compensation or other benefits from Altruist through their participation in one or more of Altruist’s programs, which created a conflict of interest on the promoters part and may have influenced the view(s) expressed. For details on compensation, benefits, and conflicts of interest, see altruist.com/RIA-testimonial. For more about the promoter’s conflicts of interest, see their advisory program brochures, available at https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/.
These testimonials may not represent the experience of others and are not a guarantee of results.
