Altruist has announced a move to a hybrid work environment, with about 90% of its employees operating out of offices in Los Angeles, Dallas and New Jersey, and about 10% staying entirely virtual. To accommodate the move, Altruist CEO Jason Wenk said the company will more than double its office space in Culver City, Calif., and relocate a large number of staff to those hub cities. It will also focus on hiring staff near those offices.
“We feel very strongly that a hybrid environment, where we get as many people as we can working closely together on the biggest problems advisors and their clients have, that's going to result in better outcomes for both advisors and their clients,” Wenk said. “And to think we could do that without spending time together, I think would be pretty challenging.”
Depending on an employee’s role, they will be mandated to work in an office three or five days a week or a couple days a month.
Pre-pandemic, Altruist had about 30 employees, almost entirely based in Venice Beach, Calif. Like others, when the pandemic hit, the company shifted to working from home, yet the company grew aggressively during that time. Including those added from Altruist’s recent acquisition of Shareholders Services Group, it now has nearly 400 employees, which are distributed across the country.
“We're planting our flag in being a hybrid company, where we choose to give some agency to the role and the team to do what's absolutely best for the end client,” Wenk said.
Altruist has had a big year. In March, it launched its own self-clearing platform, Altruist Clearing, the final step in becoming a full-service custodian. Just weeks later, it announced plans to acquire SSG, adding more than 1,600 advisors to its platform and giving Altruist close to 10% market share of total RIA firms. That was followed in April by a $112 million capital raise, bringing the custodian’s total funding to more than $290 million.
Wenk doesn’t think of Altruist as a startup anymore, and said the move to hybrid work will usher it into the next phase of growth. He also wants to maintain the integrity of Altruist’s service and accommodate the growth of the platform.
In 2022, the company tripled its assets, even before the SSG acquisition, and it grew revenue by 1,600% year-over-year. In the first seven months of this year, it has already tripled assets on the platform, and is on track to more than quadruple AUM and grow revenue by more than 1,000% this year, Wenk said. He declined to provide specific AUM numbers. Altruist now serves more than 4,000 advisors.
The custodian is even seeing some large firms converting 100% of their assets to it, Wenk said, possibly due to the upcoming integration of TD Ameritrade and Schwab. Some $2 billion is coming over to the Altruist platform over the next 60 days, about half of which are from TD.
Altruist is also hoping the move to hybrid will help as it spends more time in person with its RIA customers, a base that’s maturing into larger, more sophisticated and scaled firms.
“The fastest growing segment of firms for us is firms that are between $100 million and $1 billion of AUM, which is really interesting because in the very early days of Altruist, we had a legion of fans that were a lot of early stage, startup, scale-up firms,” Wenk said. “What we want to be able to do is bring those firms in to meet the people that are building our product, for us to be asked questions, show them visual mockups of what we're building for the next iteration of the product."
“Our objective is to, not just be a pest to the major players, but create an entirely new standard for the industry,” Wenk said. “And that, I feel, is something that is best done when you get a group of very talented people, put that density of talent together in one place for prolonged time periods, and then bring your customers in as well. That recipe is pretty powerful.”