00:00Did this take you by surprise? Yeah I think to be incredibly honest I don't think anybody could have possibly
00:07thought that somewhere between tens of billions and maybe 100 billion of market cap would be wiped out in a
00:13week.
00:14AI is very powerful and certainly the market reaction tells me that there's a lot of people voting with their
00:22dollars and the potential disruption.
00:24Jason all of this is about enabling well wealth managers individual wealth managers from your part.
00:31Just remind us what Altruist does and what this new development in terms of building in a tax tool does
00:37to help them.
00:39Yeah absolutely. So I think you hit the nail on the head like the most important thing is that we're
00:43not trying to displace financial advisors or wealth managers.
00:46It's not AI taking those jobs away. It's AI to help empower them to do better work for their clients.
00:52And in many ways when people think about wealth management you know there's there's deservedly a lot of critique.
01:01It could be things like why is it so hard to get access like the minimums are really high.
01:06Why are the costs very high? Why are the results sometimes inconsistent?
01:11And a lot of that is you know because of how much manual process and human labor is involved.
01:16You just have a lot of limiting factors. AI very much is a incredible equalizer.
01:23You know effectively with a tool like Hazel what used to take you know teams that were you know 10
01:28or more people working hundreds of hours and costing many tens of thousands of dollars.
01:34It can be done in like two to three minutes and you know users the advisor users in our case
01:40are paying a hundred ish dollars per month right.
01:42So much more affordable much more accessible in taxes just to start.
01:46We launched tax first for what it's worth because it's tax season in the U.S.
01:49We wanted that to be our first agent you know to kind of get out there in the hands of
01:52wealth managers and advisors.
01:54But this is a pretty good harbinger of the things that will come.
01:57There'll be more agents doing more work that will continue to make advice better more affordable and more accessible.
02:03Jason you will have noticed that some of the CEOs of those wealth managers appeared on television in the days
02:09that followed the sell off.
02:10Here's Charles Schwab listen to what they had to say.
02:13AI is a real accelerant.
02:14So it was puzzling to see our stock sell off related to AI because we're benefiting it from it in
02:19multiple ways and bringing it to our clients.
02:21It's allowing us to reach new clients and I think that's why you won't see the population of advisors shrink
02:28is that AI will be useful in reaching new clients that we couldn't be for.
02:33Has Mr. Worcester or any other leader in that field phoned you since Tuesday and would you be open to
02:39working with these companies literally jointly?
02:45Yes it's a no I haven't heard directly from Mr. Worcester.
02:49But we already actually work with any independent financial advisor.
02:53One of the reasons why we stood up Hazel as a separate entity altruist of course is a direct competitor
02:58to Schwab, Fidelity, LPL and others.
03:01But we wanted Hazel to be something that any advisor could use to help any client.
03:06And we didn't want them to be forced into using a single custodian.
03:10So there are already thousands of advisors who use Schwab, for example, as a custodian that are leveraging Hazel and
03:17doing doing so to drive better outcomes for their clients and a lot more operational efficiency for themselves.
03:24And we have I'd say in the last 48 hours it's in the hundreds of very large significant wealth management
03:32companies around the world reaching out to see if there's a way that we can partner.
03:37So definitely looking forward to putting this tool in as many hands of as many capable advisors in the U
03:43.S. as possible.
03:45Let's talk about the tool and the technology.
03:47You know, what are the data sets that the underlying models trained on?
03:51What is your core competence that if there is concern from from the legacy industry of wealth management, what is
03:58it they should be concerned about?
04:00And what is it that makes this model powerful?
04:04Well, so there's two two parts that I'll try to be succinct.
04:07But the first is I think what causes concern is not so much just the A.I.
04:11It's the fact that we also have built a very modern infrastructure for our wealth business.
04:16So the things you can do on Altruist, you just can't do anywhere else in terms of the speed of
04:22opening accounts and funding accounts and managing of assets.
04:25If you take A.I. and you put it on top of bad antiquated infrastructure, you're not going to get
04:32a ton of value.
04:33It's kind of akin to putting like a, you know, self-driving on a horse and buggy or something like
04:37that.
04:38Like you need to have like an entire vertically integrated ecosystem.
04:42I think if anything, that's maybe where some of the market concern is, is that what happens if something like,
04:48you know, is digital and it's 20 or 30 percent better, you add A.I. and multiple agents, it becomes
04:54two or three hundred percent better.
04:55Now, advisors could very much have a shift in where they decide to custody their assets.
04:59That could be pretty monumentally difficult to overcome for for some of the big incumbents.
05:04As far as what makes the model unique, the way that we built Hazel's, we rely, like most A.I.
05:10companies, on having really clean data.
05:14So data is a huge advantage.
05:15I think, you know, Mr. Worcester was right in saying that data is very critical.
05:20In the case of a custodian, you have the ultimate system of record, meaning we have all of this data
05:26on clients, transactions.
05:27That makes it a lot easier to give personalized analysis and feedback to the users.
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