Altruist CEO and founder Jason Wenk.
New features promise faster analysis of client returns and documents, helping RIAs surface tax insights and produce planning outputs in minutes.
Altruist is adding tax planning to its Hazel AI platform, giving advisors another way to push routine analysis and documentation into software as tax season ramps up.
The Los Angeles-based RIA custodian revealed Tuesday that Hazel can now read and interpret client documents including 1040s, pay stubs, account statements, emails, meeting notes, and custodial and CRM data, then generate tax-focused recommendations in minutes. The system is designed to surface planning opportunities and assemble client-ready outputs without manual data entry.
Altruist has positioned Hazel, the AI platform sprung from its acquisition of Thyme last June, as a sort of copilot for wealth practices, automating tasks such as summarizing meetings, drafting follow-ups, surfacing action items, and now helping construct tax plans.
“Tax planning is one of the most powerful ways advisors can improve outcomes, but it’s also slow and mentally draining, especially in the busy tax season,” Jason Wenk, founder and chief executive of Altruist, said in a written statement Tuesday. “Hazel’s tax planning feature flips that dynamic. It expands what a single advisor can handle, raises the bar on outcomes, and makes average advice a lot harder to justify.”
The new capability comes as Altruist leans harder into AI across its platform and attempts to pull more independent advisors away from legacy custodians. Altruist has reported nearly 5,700 advisors now using its platform – including some disenchanted by Schwab’s changes to its referral program last year, as well as perceived conflicts in retaining investor clients – giving it a claim as the third-largest RIA custodian by advisor headcount.
“It’s a really awkward arrangement where your custodian is like, directly competing with you, and they’re saying we’ll refer these clients out but the other ones we’re just going to keep for ourselves,” Chief Operating Officer Mazi Bahadori told InvestmentNews last month. ““I think advisors that see that feel this isn’t something that we want to be a part of.”
In November, Altruist announced a real-time custodial integration that pipes live account, household, holdings, and balance data into Hazel, letting advisors query client portfolios and run analyses in natural language during conversations. At the time, the company said Hazel was “the first AI platform for wealth managers to unify real-time data from a major custodian with CRM, emails, and meeting notes.”
The new tax tools build on that data spine. Advisors can run “what-if” scenarios around events such as bonuses, home sales, retirement timing, or lifestyle shifts and see projected tax outcomes adjust on the fly, according to the company. Altruist said advisors can either walk through those scenarios live with clients or export more traditional reports for follow-up.
On the risk and compliance side, Altruist is emphasizing that Hazel provides tax analysis and insights rather than formal tax advice, which remains the human advisors’ responsibility to provide clients. That nuance appeared to be lost on investors on Tuesday as share prices of Schwab, Raymond James, LPL, and Stifel experience high single-digit declines on apparent fears of Altruist’s AI disrupting their business models.
“The selloff appears tied to broader concerns about AI disrupting the financial advice and wealth management model,” said Neil Sipes, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, pointing to investors’ “concerns around efficiencies being competed away, fee compression long-term and potential market share shifts.”
Altruist said Hazel runs on the same infrastructure as its custodial platform, uses bank-grade encryption, and operates under zero data retention agreements with its external AI model providers, which are barred from using Altruist customer data to train their systems.
Hazel’s tax planning capability became available to users on Feb. 6 and, like the broader platform, can be used by firms that do not custody with Altruist.
Gokul Ramanathan, group product manager, Hazel at Altruist, stopped just short of claiming its new tax capability as a first in the RIA custodian space.
“As far as I’m aware, this is unprecedented amongst both RIA custodians and AI products in this industry,” Ramanathan said in emailed comments to InvestmentNews Tuesday.
“While many firms are experimenting with AI in narrow workflows, Hazel’s ability to synthesize unstructured data across documents, meetings, and emails into a coherent, client-ready tax deliverable in minutes represents a materially different approach,” he said.
The company has previously said Hazel is meant to be custodian-agnostic, with plans to add integrations beyond its own brokerage. Beyond taxes, Altruist has also disclosed plans to add compliance support and automated RMD processing to Hazel.
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