Holistic Planning, a Nacogdoches, Texas-based registered investment advisor founded in 2023 by long-time Edward Jones advisors, has built its own in-house agentic operating system and added Altruist as its preferred custodian. Holistic Planning expects to move about $450 million to Altruist, representing about 36% of its $1.25 billion in total client assets.
Jason Barber, founder and CEO of Holistic Planning and Uptick Partners, a breakaway support platform, said the partnership with Altruist has made it much easier to build the unified platform, called HolisticOS. Altruist’s real-time APIs enabled the RIA to integrate the custodial infrastructure directly into its software.
The firm will make the software available to Holistic’s in-house advisors, Uptick Partners and unaffiliated RIAs interested in purchasing it. It will officially launch at the Future Proof Festival in September.
The technology provides all the major functions an advisor would need, including account opening, CRM, portfolio analysis, messaging, compliance, money movement, e-signature, tax and estate planning and marketing. It only integrates with Altruist, Microsoft and Zoom. (The firm also uses Schwab for custody.) Barber and his team built the rest of the functionality with Claude, Anthropic’s AI tool.
Barber said he got the idea to build the technology after his team left Edward Jones to start their own RIA, and was disappointed by the tech in the independent space.
“As someone who came from Edward Jones, I was super excited about all the technology, spent a ton of time doing all this due diligence,” he said. “My honest opinion is that when you net it all out, I thought that it was actually a downgrade technology-wise moving from Edward Jones to the independent space.”
Barber’s biggest gripe was that despite the many integrations, the actual doing of his job was not easy with a dozen different logins. Whereas at Edward Jones, he could do everything in one system. Now, the entire concept of a “tech stack,” he says, is dead.
“When I hear the word integration, I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want that anymore.’ Integration is like duct tape,” he said.
He also didn’t like that when he pulled a data feed from his custodian into his tech system, he was getting the previous day’s value for client accounts. And if a client needed him to send money, update beneficiaries or change their address, he would have to log into the custodian to get that done.
“Altruist is changing that,” he said. “And so with our software, we’re going to have what are called real-time APIs into our software where we’re going to be able to send money, move money, place trades, update beneficiaries, open accounts, all that kind of stuff inside of our software without ever having to log into Altruist. That’s like the holy grail.”
HolisticOS also has its own AI agent, so it won’t be using Hazel, Altruist’s AI platform.
On the custody side, Barber said he was attracted to Altruist’s alternative investments marketplace, and he said the process of transferring its alternatives business to Altruist has been much easier than with other custodians. The entire process is digital, he said, and he recently moved a client from Schwab to Altruist in just 90 seconds.