Altruist is a relatively new player among platforms serving financial advisors, and it bolstered its chops with today’s announcement that BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors and Redwood Investment Management now offer managed portfolios on the company’s site.

Founded in 2018 by former advisor Jason Wenk, Altruist is a Venice, Calif.-based fintech firm billing itself as an all-in-one, paperless platform enabling advisors to serve clients with low-cost, cutting-edge tools in areas ranging from opening and funding accounts to rebalancing assets and simplifying reporting.

In February, Altruist debuted its Portfolio Marketplace that features model portfolios from Vanguard and Dimensional Fund Advisors. Altruist users can also build custom model portfolios on this marketplace.

Now Altruist has expanded its Portfolio Marketplace by adding BlackRock’s Target Allocation ESG and Target Allocation ETF Series managed model portfolios, State Street’s Active Asset Allocation ETF Portfolios and Redwood’s Engineered Risk-Budgeted Series portfolios.

The addition of these asset managers is an attention grabber that boosts Altruist’s capabilities and cache, but Wenk said bringing them on board is only part of the company’s value-add for advisors.

One aspect he highlighted was the ability to trade fractional shares on the Altruist site.

“No other platform trades with fractional shares like we do,” Wenk said. “We give financial advisors more choice and flexibility, enabling them to serve a broader and more inclusive client base.”

And, he noted, Altruist builds all of the software in its technology suite that aggregates numerous functions into a unified platform.

“When someone uses Altruist, they just plug in and start working with clients,” he said. “All of the key things are there: You can open accounts online and don’t have to do paperwork. Clients can fund their accounts through a mobile account on their phone in seconds. Once an advisor has opened an account, they can build and manage model portfolios. All of the performance reporting and fee billing is fully automated through a simple desktop application.”

Altruist’s platform is free for the first 100 client accounts, and then it’s $1 per account per month after that. And Wenk claims the services it offers advisors cost significantly less than the industry average.

“For that start-up advisor who otherwise might have to spend up to $30,000 in software fees just to get up and running, they can get up and running here very quickly, scale their business and serve many times more customers because they’re not managing a lot of technology.

“Our prices for those types of services are typically 90% or more lower on the software side, and that’s because it’s not our only revenue source,” he added.

Altruist comprises both a broker-dealer and a registered investment advisor, along with its parent company, which builds all of the software and integrates the different pieces.

“We do make money in each of our products lines, but we try to compress each of those [fee] levels so that advisors and their clients can get as much of their returns as possible,” he added.

In May, Altruist raised $50 million in a funding round led by venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners. In January, Altruist announced a funding round for an undisclosed amount led by its venture partner, Venrock, along with participation from others including personal investments from noted advisor Ron Carson of Carson Group and Bill McNabb, Vanguard’s former chairman and CEO. McNabb also sits on Altruist’s board of directors.

For Wenk, this all validates his vision for Altruist as a way to simplify how financial advisors do their job. He said that vision stems from the frustrations he has felt during his 21 years in financial services that the industry doesn’t always reach the people it needs to reach.

He began his career in 2000 as a system analyst with Morgan Stanley. “After a couple of years I realized the things I was doing, such as building software for automated investment management or productivity software, was never going to get into the hands of people I knew. So the average person wouldn’t benefit from this,” he said.

He later started Retirement Wealth Advisors, a financial planning firm, along with FormulaFolios, a quantitative investment research firm. Both have offices in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Costa Mesa, Calif. Wenk said he still owns about 10% of both firms, but he hasn’t been actively involved with them for a few years. He noted that while both companies are successful, their scale is limited by how much they’re able to grow their respective customer bases.

“I realized the dent I could make wouldn’t be as impactful as if we went right to the core and addressed what was limiting my own firms from growing,” he explained. “And a lot of that was the various solutions we’re creating at Altruist in terms of how we’re making it easier to open accounts and removing barriers like trading commissions. We need sweeping infrastructure changes to allow human financial advisors to do their best work.”

Wenk wouldn’t provide figures on how many financial advisors use Altruist’s platform, but he said they represent the industry spectrum.

“We have firms all over the map in terms of AUM and in age,” he said. “But we have a lot of what I call emerging advisors who are thinking innovatively about how to make the industry better. They want to compress their costs so they can pass on those savings to their clients so they get better returns. And they want to serve a more inclusive group of people rather than having to focus on people with more than $500,000 or $1 million.”