Goodbye TD Ameritrade, Hello Altruist

I have interviewed, tested, and demo’d many different custodial platforms: Altruist, SEI, SSG, Schwab, IBKR, Axos, and a few others. After many hours of work and discussions with other advisors, I came to conclusion that Altruist fits what I am building at Branson Financial Planning.

Why aren’t you staying on the Charles Schwab platform once TD Ameritrade merges with them?

Schwab had a few big items that didn’t align with what I’m building (in no particular order):

• Technology: The Schwab platform looks as though it was designed in 1997. User experience is important and Schwab is leaps and bounds behind what Altruist has and is building.

• Custodial dedication: Schwab has an enormous retail arm. I question their dedication to building an excellent experience for their smaller RIAs on their platform. Altruist is built for RIAs only. They have no retail arm. Their entire business is built specifically for businesses just like Branson Financial Planning.

• Small fish, big pond: While this might not effect you directly, this does effect Branson Financial Planning (and indirectly this would effect you). I do not want to be a small fish in a big pond and that’s exactly what I would be at Schwab.

Schwab has one thing going for it that Altruist doesn’t have: brand name recognition. I did not want to go with a custodial platform simply because they are more well known.

You mentioned in the past using multiple custodians to manage your clients money. Is this not the case?

I did consider about a year ago sticking with multiple custodians. After many hours of research and discussions with other advisors who did this in the past, I found this to be a logistical nightmare. More processes and more systems. It just didn’t make sense. Especially at my size.

Can you remind me again who Altruist is?

Altruist is a custodial platform (the place where all your investments are held). You can find more by going to Altruist.com. In terms of security:

-Altruist is an SEC-registered broker-dealer and a member of both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

-Altruist implements “around the clock monitoring and AES 256 encryption. Altruist earned a SOC 2 Type 1 Report, which means an independent auditor has examined our systems for the security, processing integrity, availability, and continuity of your data.” This is bank level encryption.

Next Steps

For those who are not on Altruist yet, I will discuss next steps in our next meeting. My goal is to have this transition done in the next few months. As always, I’m available to chat should you have any questions.

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