Today, we are proud to congratulate Jason Wenk and the entire Altruist team on joining Vanguard.
This milestone is a powerful validation of the belief that has guided Altruist from the beginning. Financial advisors should spend their time helping clients, not fighting the systems meant to support them.
Jason did not have to imagine that problem. He had lived it. Across more than two decades in wealth management, including founding and operating two advisory firms of his own, he saw what was required to earn the trust of more clients while running on infrastructure that had not kept pace. A handful of legacy custodians sat at the center of the industry, surrounded by a fragmented collection of tools for account opening, trading, portfolio management, billing, reporting, and client service.
The cost extended beyond software spend. Advisors were losing time, too.
Altruist saw an opportunity to rethink the underlying infrastructure from the ground up.
Jason and the team combined self-clearing custody with an end-to-end software platform advisors use to operate their businesses. By owning the full stack, Altruist could simplify the advisor and client experience, move faster, build around the needs of its customers, and implement AI in differentiated ways.
When we first met Jason years ago, we were struck by his ambition, mission orientation, customer obsession, and depth of industry knowledge. Custody is one of the hardest categories in financial services to disrupt. The technical and regulatory barriers are high. Trust is earned slowly. Switching is difficult. Incumbents benefit from inertia. Yet Altruist broke through by giving advisors a fundamentally better way to run their businesses, and we were excited to partner with Altruist by leading the Series E in 2024.
The company never stopped innovating on behalf of financial advisors. Over the last year alone, Altruist has launched alternative assets, options, margin, personalized indexing, tax planning and so much more. With Hazel, Altruist brought AI into the heart of the advisor workflow. Because the company owns the infrastructure, Hazel can connect to the data, context, and actions that shape an advisor’s day. Alongside that, Altruist’s ability to service different types of advisors and clients has expanded significantly.
With every new feature, the focus has stayed consistent: make investing fair and financial advice better.
That is what makes this next chapter feel so natural. Vanguard has spent more than fifty years lowering the cost of investing, expanding access, and putting long-term investor outcomes first. Altruist has spent the past eight years modernizing the infrastructure that helps advisors do the same for their clients. Vanguard brings extraordinary scale and investment expertise. Altruist brings AI-forward infrastructure and product innovation. Together, they have the opportunity to continue to meaningfully advance the future of financial advice.
To Jason and the entire Altruist team: building a new custodian from the ground up was audacious. Earning the trust to build significant mindshare with the community and make a real dent in the industry was no small feat. But you did it without ever compromising the core mission. It has been a privilege to partner with you. Congratulations on this extraordinary milestone. We know this is just the beginning, and we look forward to everything to come.
Published:
August 26, 2026
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