Masters in Business · Friday, July 17, 2026
Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of Altruist, described the current infrastructure used by financial professionals as "pretty old," with many systems dating back 50 to 70 years and operating on mainframes. He highlighted issues such as the inability of custodians like Schwab and Fidelity to provide consolidated household-level reporting without third-party software and the complexities of fee billing processes.
“the whole rest of the industry is pretty old. If you think about most of the infrastructure that's used by financial professionals, the major already, if it's fifty to seventy. Years old, that's amazing. And it operates on mainframes, not you know, cloud native platforms.”
“But the reality is that you cannot get that information from your custodian. The custodian will only be able to tell you what you have today. It will give you access to your statements. The statements are not bundled at the household level.”
“Custodian will say, that's cool. What you need to do is we'll send you the data to a third party. They can reconcile the data. You can then run a billing schema. It'll create a CSV file. You can then upload that to our system.”