Altruist has added a financial planning agent to Hazel, the AI platform it built for advisory firms, pushing the tool beyond the tax planning work that put it on the industry’s radar earlier this year.
The agent stitches together a full plan across the six areas that advisors often work through one by one: retirement savings, portfolio positioning, cash flow, estate needs, tax exposure, and insurance and risk coverage. Advisors have traditionally spent hours pulling those pieces together, Altruist said in a press release, while the agent can turn out a client-ready plan in minutes.
“Hazel’s financial planning agent allows a single advisor to do much of the work that a shop full of specialists would do, in a fraction of the time,” said Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of Altruist, in the release. “We believe this launch will fundamentally shift how advisors operate and how firm owners run their businesses.”
The tool is available to any advisory firm, not just those that custody assets with Altruist, and lets advisors run scenarios live with clients, adjusting savings, investment, and spending assumptions to see how each choice moves the plan.
The Hazel’s financial plans aren’t built just from uploaded client documents, the release said. The software’s AI layer also pulls context automatically from client meetings, message threads, notes, and whatever other systems a firm has already linked to the platform, according to Altruist. The company said it is careful to separate what the AI is responsible for from what it isn’t—the model organizes and interprets client information, but a separate calculation engine produces the actual numbers that land in a plan.
As for client data security, Altruist said the same privacy terms apply across every Hazel feature in that customer data is never used to train AI models or sold to outside parties, and the underlying AI model providers operate under zero-data-retention agreements that bar them from holding on to anything belonging to Altruist or its clients.
The addition puts Hazel in more direct competition with standalone financial planning software, as advisors weigh whether to consolidate more of their tech stack inside a single AI-driven brand. Altruist has described the tool as the second in a planned series of Hazel expansions, following the tax planning agent that debuted in February to widespread notice across the advisor world.
The launch also lands in the middle of a bigger transition for Altruist. Vanguard announced last week that it would acquire the company for $4.6 billion in cash, a deal that would bring one of the fastest-growing challengers in RIA custody under the roof of the world’s second-largest asset manager. Vanguard, which first invested in Altruist in 2020, said Altruist would keep operating as a standalone business, retaining its leadership team, brand, and advisor-focused model. The deal is expected to close later this year, subject to regulatory approval.