YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Wenk

lines on the record: 80
first: 2026-07-17
most recent: 2026-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, I don't know that there's necessarily some innovation that I wish I knew. I just wish I would have spent more time getting proximate to really high caliber people. Now that I'm older and I've done a few things, I've got the chance to meet some just outstanding people. Man, if you can get close to those people early in your career, it's just going to be such a massive accelerant because your way of thinking is going to be so much better and sharper and inspired. That's what I do.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in any career, I would become the most AI forward person in your field that you could possibly be. So it does not matter if you're working in sales, if you're working in tech, if you're working in financial services. I mean, if you can become the person when you walk into the room, you are the absolute master of Claude for your job function. I think that's one of the most important things for any person. I think young people have an actual advantage there and it's when they should definitely be leveraging.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Avoided my pistons. I'm a Detroit Pistons fan. But so, yeah, I don't watch a lot of TV. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. So listen to yours. I listen to a big fan of Henry Stebbings, so 20 VC is a good one. I listen to quite a bit. And then I listened to Lenny's podcast. If you're a tech person, everyone who Lenny is, he's a product person that goes into the deep on how different tech companies are being built, especially kind of product-led companies. So those are some things I listen to a lot”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, these are a little bit cornier, but some of the most important books for me. I'm a total math nerd, so I can live in a max Tagmark book for forever. I had to learn a lot of soft skills to be a better entrepreneur. I learned a lot of those from reading Seth Godin's books, like one of my favorite amazing books, great blog as well.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right now, I'm reading Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. It's like a book from 2016-2017. He was one of MIT and one of the real forward, like early thought leaders in AI. And so he kind of like, you know, there's three phases of AI. And I'd say we're in like Life 2.0 right now, still human-powered and get to read the book, you'll find with 3.0 is a good one.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a Nick Beim was our first investor altruist, he was also a big supporter of me at my last company. He's a partner at Venrock, and he's just awesome.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's hard to predict with precision just how big, but I suspect will be very large. If we look at the trajectory of the business today, again, we don't talk a lot about our numbers publicly. So people have to sort of sort of like, well, take Jason's word for it. But in our first five years of operating, from when we opened our first account through five years, we had more assets on our platform than Robinhood, betterment, wealth front, public, stash, M1, Acorns combined. So when people wonder is this working, it's scaling very, very rapidly and it's growing at a really, really fast pace. People, I think sometimes don't understand that the sort of network effect you get when you serve advisors and those advisors are growing fast firms like yours are going super fast. The clients are adding deposits to their existing accounts that market”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're trying to compare what I do compared to other entrepreneurs, so I can't really say if there's a lesson to be learned broadly. With each venture that I've been involved with, I've started with a pretty simple North Star, which is I want to help people. These are all mission-driven organizations. I'm very passionate about that. This allows you to attract other people that are also mission driven. These are your more missionaries versus mercenaries. And we have some of the most incredible people that I could never even dream of assembling a team like what we have at Altruist, but it's because they share that same kind of core ethos of serving clients, driving better outcomes, against sort of being on the right side of the customer. Doing things that really matter.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, these are all pretty connected businesses. If someone looks at like the evolution arc of my career, it's sort of like each time I find a problem, again, metaphorically go on to the next. Yeah, you kind of go, okay, well, that was an interesting problem, but this is an even bigger problem. And this is an even bigger problem. I'm curious now, I think there's going to be reasonably good need for a highly specialized LLM specifically narrowly trained for our industry. I'm not sure the big LM. So maybe we'll do that at some point in the future. But the point is there's always something that has the potential to make a bigger impact. And one thing that I'll say for me, again, I don't spend a ton of time.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very proven. Like, you can very objectively say, if we give every single client, I don't know, 1% back in economic advantage and you scale that across trillions of dollars for decades, you can start measuring your impact in hundreds of billions of dollars. That's to me more than like a small startup. Like that's incredibly ambitious, but it's like incredibly good for humanity. I hope more people do this type of stuff.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That when we look back in 20 years and say, okay, well, or maybe 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, but some amount of time in the future, we look back at what were the most impactful companies that made the biggest difference on society. I'm not so sure those are the ones that we'll be talking about. Really? I think it'll be businesses like altruists that we'll be talking about and going, wow, like they have managed to unlock trillions of dollars for consumers. And that is not something that any of us can be convinced is possible with foundation models yet. At this point, all they are are money guzzling machines that have yet to figure out how to turn inference into profits, in other words, their costs are higher than what they're reselling their products and services for. I'm as big a fan and believer and user of AI products as anybody. But when we really start measuring impact, like what changes the world, that's very possible, but there's nothing proven about it. What we're doing is...”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, there's a serious cost to start a custodian. So beyond the cost of building all of the technology, there's also the regulatory requirements and the capital requirements. So when you run brokerage business, every time you add a new client and new dollars to your platform, you have to have reserve capital on your broker dealer. And so there's no shortcut. Like this is something where I tell people every now and again, they'll ask me, like, hey, you know, what would it take for someone to compete? And I say, well, it take about five years and at least $250 million just to have a shot, just to have any shot in the dark of making it. That assumes, of course, you do it right and what you build is somehow substantially better than anything else in the market and you can get enough clients to run it on. But just to give yourself a shot, it's like, again, non-trivial. And just to pick up, because you made a comment about these sort of hyperscalers building these foundation models, I'm not so...”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, look, in our industry, every broker dealer's financial records are public. So, you know, you're going to go look up our balance sheet. It's not hard to find. But we still use cash on balance sheet for R&D investments to keep building more tools. But you can imagine if we backed off from our aggressive building of products and features, yeah, it wouldn't be a hard business to run standalone for decades.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple Yeah, so we've raised a little over $600 million in capital over the last seven years. I don't think we'll need any additional capital going forward like we still have a lot of cash on balance sheet.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actors to even get in the door. And this is like overstating the obvious, but just having modern multi factor authentication and requirement of security keys, even eliminating some of the highest risk, like for example, like phone calls are a lot easier to dupe.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think the biggest reason they'd have that paranoia is that if you're working on a 50-year-old tech stack, and we see this with the latest anthropic model, these connected models where You know, they sit it on top of some legacy infrastructure and they'll find hundreds of critical vulnerabilities that no human being could have ever identified because the code base is essentially one giant monolithic code base. So it is just like this huge albatross that these companies have been dealing with for decades and replatforming is really hard. If you're already big in your scale and you've got tens of trillions of dollars, it is nearly impossible to replatform and go from physical mainframe-based technology into a cloud-based infrastructure using smaller, more manageable microservices. So yeah, it's a huge risk. If I was running a giant old bank or brokerage, I would have the same probably primary paranoia. If you're building today, you know, the best defense is oftentimes a strong offense. So why not just build again in first principles a bunch of protocols to make it much harder for bad?”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perspective on every unique client that you serve. So these are the things that we're building. I mean, I think in the end, the clearing and custody business will end up becoming very ageentic. Like these agents will be the ones who are probably logging on, if you will, and they'll be performing functions that today humans have to log in into, but it's a pretty exciting time to build.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't earn enough money and revenue from the lower end of your client base. The other compromise might be I am not willing to compromise in the quality and service and attention, but as a result, I can only serve 50 families. And so my minimum is going to have to be $10 million or something like that. So the compromise is I can't actually give my advice to as many people as I'd like to. AI is this great equalizer where we think about all the infrastructure we built on altruist and you then layer all of the agents that can do things like gather data for you, build financial plans, build tax plans, help you be incredibly responsive to client emails and questions to build a level of intelligence across your client base that no human being could ever possibly attain. So it's very easy to have incredibly precise and highly personalized”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these emotions that kind of these folks will live through with you. So it could be massive changes in macro conditions. It could be changes to their family, whether it's death, divorce, new children, et cetera. I mean, there's so many things that happen. And advisors have to be able to react, ideally be proactive, but react to all these things and make sure your money is aligned at all times. And this is where AI is incredibly powerful, where you can take a ton of that work that used to be heavily compromised. And compromise is interesting because every advisor, whether they want to admit it or not, historically has been making compromises for the clients. And so kind of one of two directions, like one compromise is, I want to save the world. I've got a hero complex. I'm going to take every client under the sun. If I do that, the compromises I can't possibly give the highest level of quality care and service to every client.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's usually not fast. You don't have a lot of clarity. Like, hey, when is my transfer going to be done? Like, why did this thing get rejected? Why am I redoing this paperwork? So we solved a lot of the infrastructure now with our AI products, Hazel, we're tackling like the rest of the 30 years, right? So maybe there's going to five percent or less of a client relationship that's really connected to custodian. You're onboarding the client, you're setting up rules around trading and rebalancing and tax management. But a lot of the work really is all of the one-to-one hard-to-scale work. So you meet a new client, they're a prospect at this point, you need to uncover a bunch of data that they have. You need to then analyze that, build a financial plan, create a proposal. Once they agree to it, then you do that onboarding, and now you have to serve that client for decades. And there's going to be all of these life events that happen.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, like, this is as big and hairy as they get, right? And there's just, again, there's no shortcuts, but that infrastructure is so critical because what it allows you to do if it's done the right way is it allows you to tackle all the other work, right? So I'll start with this work, right? The custody part, you can open account super fast, you know, do all of the automation around onboarding clients. This is great, but you only onboard a client once, ideally. And so if you serve a client for 30 years, the custody part is really a pretty small part of the picture. It was a huge... Kind of friction point because it was oftentimes one of the first experiences that a client would have with their advisor. And if it was a bad experience like.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we break this down into like two elements. So, you know, with Altruist, we have our core wealth business. This is like the custody and related software to custody. We started there. It's a super big hairy build. It just takes a long time, just hundreds of thousands of engineering hours. There's no shortcuts. Very expensive, time-consuming.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More than 100 million. And then the other half are state registered firms that are sub 100 million. Some of those are just new entrants. Like they're just firms that are first registration. They'll probably mature into the SEC within a year or two. And others just operate small, independent businesses serving a loyal but small group of clients. Yeah, the top of the market, I think Persian gets oftentimes lumped into the big three. They don't have much market share of the RIA segment. It's a bit muddy, but the reason is they support all of the big broker dealers that usually they have a companion corporate RIA. And so that's kind of how they get in here. But true standalone RIAs, I mean, 85% of the assets are with just two companies, Schwab being the largest. They're north of 50%.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the approximate number is 10 trillion today. It's about 35,000 firms. These firms are roughly half are SEC registered investment advisors. Meaning more than more than more”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a ton of fun to build, and a lot of what we're doing is just taking the hardest, most like laborious, non-glamorous, but important work that used to really be hard to get if you didn't have tens of millions of dollars. And we're just bringing the unit cost down to like three to five dollars. So you can do like incredibly complex tax planning and do it for, again, effectively like a dollar to five dollars. This makes it accessible to everybody. And AI, people have their fears about what could go wrong. But we like to think this is a lot of the what can go right.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the basic thought to answer your question, it's very tightly integrated with altruist, but it's available totally separate. So really any wealth manager can use it. We have people using it all over the world in many different industries. So we have large CPA firms that are using Hazel and obviously large financial advisory firms. So part of the thinking here is that the altruist business will eventually be a very large scaled business with trillions of dollars in assets. But the total size of our industry is going to be tenfold that, right? So we don't want to limit the power of AI to just the whatever percentage of market share that altruist has. We want everybody to benefit from these innovations. And so the things that are really cool with Hazel is that, again, it can be used by any financial advisor or really a lot of different segments of financial services.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Yeah, it's material. And consumers, consumers, if using the platform correctly, are getting better results as well. So because they don't have things like cash drag, because they can be more fully invested, because they can reduce the need for third-party investment products, they can hold securities directly on the platform, reducing expense ratios. Because we have automation around tax management, they can drive down the tax consequences of investing materially. So again, it's one of these things where it almost sounds too good to be true, right? But like, yes, advisors should be able to run more efficient, better businesses. We can have a great business and consumers can win too. I think that is very much a real possibility. There doesn't have to be a loser. And so, yeah.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, we have the lowest fee schedule in the entire industry. But it's because we do more for those advisors than just provide custody and clearing. We're offering software and services, AI products, asset management services, automations around things like tax management and tax loss harvesting. So because people use more surface area, we end up having more and more diverse revenue as a business, and we have much better operating leverage because we have so much automation that we don't have to hire a lot of people to actually offer this at scale. So these are a lot of the benefits to modern, right? You do it this way in this day and age. You're not going to build the same way you would if you did it 50 years ago.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get a literally ridiculous ROI on your quarter or year. 100%. Yeah, you can open an entire family's accounts, do all of their account transfers, link all their bank accounts, do the whole thing in under two minutes. The accounts are being real-time validated. The transfers are being real-time validated. 98 plus percent of these workflows, there's no human being ever involved in them. So every time we build a new innovation or automation, we're able to operate with a much higher amount of operating leverage than anyone else in the industry. This allows us to invest back into more innovation, which allows us to offer more services at lower price points. So look, we earn revenue just like everyone else does. I think one interesting tidbit we don't talk a lot about, but is the fact that on the aggregate altruist earns more revenue than I believe any other RA custodian on a per dollar basis means per dollar on our platform, we earn more revenue than the big players. And it's not because we charge.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. And we do it with, I'd say, fairly insane amounts of automation. So, you know, the kind of knock I made on using PDFs, like there's no PDFs necessary at Ultra.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do earn money again on float, but we offer fractional shares. So we have the lowest cash holdings in the entire industry. People can hold virtually nothing. We also have some earnings from things like mutual funds, but we have the lowest amount of mutual funds in the entire industry because we offer fractional shares so people can buy ETFs, they can buy individual securities. So we have very, very little in. We built all of these things natively, and most of them are either free or very low cost because we have this sort of benefit, if you will, of stacking the various forms of services that advisors and their clients need.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money on net interest income, the float, if you will. We make some revenue on payment for order flow, but we built what's called the wheel order routing system. It's 100% optimized to drive the best possible execution for every single client transaction. If we happen to get a better execution through Citadel or Jane Street or whomever, we might make a tiny amount, like literally measured in fractions of basis points, mills. It's the lowest amount of revenue we earn, but like there is something there.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the key is doing whatever you're doing transparently. And whenever you can, giving as much of the economics to the client. So I'm a big believer in the flywheel kind of made popular by good to great, one of my favorite books. And our flywheel is that the first spoke is invest in innovation that drives better outcomes for advisors. The second is invest in innovation that drives better outcomes for end consumers, the end client. If we do those two things, it will drive the highest satisfaction amongst our user base. This will increase the amount of assets on our platform, which gives us the scale to invest more in innovation, right? So which drives better outcomes for advisors, better outcomes for clients. If you're going to do that, you have to earn revenue, like, of course. But in our case, we built a very integrated wealth platform. So yes, we have custody and clearing revenue.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever talk about, and to your point on float and liquidity through PFOF, payment for order flow, I mean, it just really opened everyone's eyes into the fact that the clearing and custody business turns out it wasn't a high scale, low margin business at all. In fact, it was a very high margin business. And that was just one kind of irrelevant piece that confused people into believing that was the full price of admission.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a ton of things that I'd say historically been ignored or unknown. The biggest revelation when everybody went commission free was people started asking questions, well, how the heck do you make money? Like how does this business actually work if you're giving away everything for free? Only then did people start to go, oh, wait a minute. Like that wasn't even how you made money. That was literally like just a complete smoke and mirrors way to fool me into believing you only made $7 a trade when the reality was all of the real money was made by paying me 0.01% interest on my idle cash, making me trade whole shares, which makes me have more cash in my account than I really should, making me buy these different funds that all have a bunch of conflicts of interest through all of their various forms of 12B1 and 15C3 revenue sharing agreements. I mean, like just like very esoteric stuff that very few people”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% right that if you look at the big public companies that were in the space they were making maybe five to ten percent of the revenue is from transactions and commissions were maybe half of the transaction revenue right the transaction”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really is just so perfect. That matter even more. So we did this for custodians, right? And the thing people saw was the commission. So there was this belief in advisors even didn't know the facts. They would go to clients and say, hey, when you work with us and our independent third party custodian, here's how they get paid. They get paid $7 if you do a trade. It's a pretty cheap blood price.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that's a huge misconception. So what's interesting is that I wrote this piece in 2018 and we had one of our designers kind of draw a infographic kind of behind it. And it was the classic sort of tip of the iceberg where we showed what you see above the waterline and then what exists below the water line. I just did one of those”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there was one party that really was happy with the status quo, right? And so I think as soon as we shed a little bit of light, now there's a ton of challenges you have to overcome, but again, there's no doubt in my mind this was going to work when I started.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New name post retirement name. And I love him dearly. But I remember I met him very early in building altruist and we met for coffee in Venice, California, where the company was started. And Omani looked at me after I explained the company and he's like, and pardon my friend here, but he's like, you know, this is the craziest effing idea I've ever heard. I'm in. Like, how do I give you part of it? I think there's a certain number of people who just, like, we've been doing this a long time. You eventually become numb to the status quo. The status quo was totally. It was not good for anybody.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have time on your side, like you will absolutely win. I think one of the best examples of that in our industry is Vanguard. Like what they did, they were laughed at for decades. A long time, you know, and they didn't even really reach massive scale for 25, 30 years into their journey. But I think, again, if you just put yourself on the right side of the client, the end client, hey, we're going to do things that objectively and obviously produce better outcomes on an after fee, after tax, after cash drag basis. We're going to provide delightful experiences with a true partnership with our advisor clients. These things will work. And again, I think you have to have a certain amount of craziness. One of our early investors, you might know Omani Carson, formerly known as Ron Carson. I was going to say, Oman is...”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Costs investors a ton of money, you end up limiting the amount of tax benefits, you end up increasing the average client account size. So if you really want to have great efficacy kind of investment outcomes, you'd have to have tens of millions of dollars. And if you had fractional shares as just one example, all of a sudden at You know, a ton of that entrenched kind of history goes away completely. Everybody can get access to the same type of investment.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely. But a lot of it is you just start kind of going okay, like maybe this is a good tinfoil hat theory here, but I'd say what would the benefit to them be by not enabling fractional shares? Maybe that means more cash will be in client accounts. Maybe they make half of their revenue from the cash spread, right? The net interest income on cash that sits idle in client accounts. Maybe it also forces you if you do want to use fractional shares the only vehicle you can use that trades and fractional shares, in other words, you can do notional dollar base buying, are mutual funds. And these mutual funds pay tremendous fees for distribution through these brokerage platforms. What if they are not allowing fractional shares because they really don't want to disintermediate packaged products in general, right? So make things like direct securities more accessible to more people. I mean, I just went down this rabbit hole, but the end result is it.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what is the impact of forcing people to use whole shares? Like, why would the big custodians force you to use whole shares versus fractional shares? Fractional shares trading had been around for over 20 years.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I felt tremendous pain. My biggest pain point was my custodian onboarding new client. Skin, they were making you download forms from a form library, populate the forms by hand, send them out via DocuSign at best, sometimes requiring wedding signatures or medallion signature guarantees. It was literally like going backwards in time 20 years. Meanwhile, you had companies like Robinhood that you could download an app on your phone at 18 years old, have your account open in 30 seconds, fund it with $100 and buy fractional shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock commission free. I mean, it was so obvious to me that the old way that custodians have been operating, they were still charging commissions using paper. This was definitely not the right way to do things. And if you started looking at the impact to clients.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every year You don't have to look very far and wide or have too many conversations to hear wealth managers gripe about their custodians. I mean, again, I was running one of the largest, I think when I stepped down from Formula Flows at the time, it was the fastest growing RIA in the history of the entire industry. We were growing at 16,000% three-year growth rate. So it was a true rocket ship in the sense of the RIA space.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think. A big part of the confidence came from that early advisory reaction. But the truth is that these companies don't have high NPS. These aren't like loved by them. Net promoter score. Net promoter. Okay. Yeah”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can help shine a light on what are the most important things. So, yeah, in the end, I think we have more than caught their attention. I think now there's a fairly deep-rooted fear actually from a lot of the bigger players.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To change their cost structure, why would they want to modernize their systems? Like, things were great for those companies. So you're not surprised that some folks may have been dismissive. But advisors never were. Like when we first started putting prototypes out into the public and sharing our vision, we had thousands of advisors that signed up for our waitlist, hundreds that decided to become design partners like very early kind of design partners help us build the platform. We have this sort of very loyal base of users that are very loud about how happy they are with the product. And we've done this by co-creating it with the advisors. So, you know, it's not lost on me that there are literally thousands of features that you have to build to support the wealth management industry. We can't possibly know all thousand internally. So you need to have some awesome partners.”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I could remember where to properly attribute this to, but there's a great saying that that is that first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you win. So it's not surprising when somebody has a big bold declaration they're going to change an industry and make it better. you know effectively like a duopoly or oligopoly as our industry was, almost all the assets were held by at the time three custodians. Back then it was Schwab Fidelity and TD Ameritrade, TD Ameritrade shortly after we launched was acquired by Schwab, really making the power dynamic like two companies that have 80 plus percent market share. So respectfully, I think, yeah, like there's going to be a natural rent-seeking sort of mentality from those people who are the dominant players. Why would they ever want there to be any change? Why would they want?”
2026-07-17 · Masters in Business · Challenging The Titans of Asset Management with Jason Wenk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source