Altruist: AI-Driven Full Custody Securities Brokerage & Intelligent Portfolio Accounting
Before Altruist was launched, Residential Investment Advisors (RIA) had two choices: use poorly maintained plarforms offered by wirehouses or use a series of disconnected point solutions.
Altruist changed this by offering an end-to-end digital brokerage based on simplicity, speed, and delight—starting with a Portfolio Accounting System (PAS).
After learning the acronyms, the design challenge was simple: determine the 10% of features RIA's actually use in their current PAS & focus on expediting those flows in an MVP that looks visually stunning while requiring nearly zero onboarding.
This approach required auditing the heavily analog process currently frustrating RIA's and stretching the limits of what wirehouses currently supported in terms of digital account opening and transferring assets via Automated Customer Account Transfer Service (ACATS).
Learning to build a minimal brokerage was immensely rewarding in the sense that every pixel had to earn its right to be on the screen. We successfully translated financial noise into relevant signals. With that solved, we began to build action flows to address those insights.
To make that translation possible, we needed to know how advisors leveraged an incredibly vast pool of available financial data. This led our 0-1 experience at Altruist being unique: we leveraged brand design to build a captive audience before building the product.
In execution, this meant creating a brilliant brand site that spoke the core desire all RIA's shared: having a toolset that reflected the value they were providing to their clients.
In terms of design goals, our first step was to capture a dynamic waiting list that could be shuffled based on best fit as we began to shape our initial features.
Users were motivated to answer our weekly product ideation surveys because survey engagement helped move up their place on the list.
