This week, Vanguard announced a deal to acquire Altruist, a technology and custody platform used by thousands of independent financial advisors. Unless you work in wealth management, the deal itself isn’t the interesting part. What matters is the problem the deal is trying to solve.
Vanguard CEO Salim Ramji named that problem directly: far more people could benefit from financial advice than the industry has the capacity to serve. That problem isn’t new. Financial advice has always been limited by cost, access, and the simple fact that there are only so many advisors.
What’s new is the technology. For the first time, AI and sophisticated planning systems can do more than make each advisor more efficient. They can put real financial capability directly into people’s hands, at a fraction of the traditional cost. That’s the shift worth watching.
Financial Guidance Has Always Had a Capacity Problem
Every household faces decisions that shape decades of financial life:
- When can I retire?
- How much can I safely spend?
- When should I claim Social Security?
- Should I convert money to a Roth?
- How should I invest?
- Can I help my kids and still be okay?
- What happens if I live to 95?
- Which decision matters most right now?
Households with significant wealth have traditionally solved this by hiring a financial advisor. It’s a good model. Human advisors bring expertise, judgment, and accountability that a lot of people want.
It’s also hard to scale. The industry’s answer has been to make each advisor handle more clients: better software, less paperwork, smoother custody and portfolio management. That’s what Altruist built, and what Vanguard just bought. It’s progress, but it’s also a ceiling. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 24,100 new financial advisor openings a year, and most of those replace advisors who retire rather than grow the profession.
I started Boldin around a different question: what if people had access to the same tools, analysis, and alerts advisors use, built for them to run on their own at a much lower cost?
Financial Guidance Is Too Expensive for Most Households
Millions of people who could use sophisticated financial guidance never get it. Recent polling shows why: only about a third of American investors currently work with a financial planner or advisor. The top reason people give for skipping one has nothing to do with distrust. Most say they don’t think they have enough money invested to justify it, or don’t think the cost matches the value they’d get back.
Altruist has helped advisors deliver advice more efficiently. But there’s little evidence that efficiency has lowered what most people pay for comprehensive advice. Most advisors are still paid a percentage of the assets they manage, a fee built around investment guidance. That leaves out the many other decisions that also shape financial lives: when to claim Social Security, whether to convert to a Roth, how much to spend each year, what to do with an inheritance or a layoff.
If technology only makes advisors faster while the client still pays thousands of dollars, most people stay priced out. Making the traditional advice model more efficient is useful. But it doesn’t fundamentally change its economics for the consumer. We also need to put powerful financial capabilities directly into the hands of individuals.
Technology Is Making Individuals More Capable, Not Just Advisors
Boldin opens up a different path. People can now see their accounts in one place, build retirement projections, model taxes, compare Social Security claiming strategies, and run what-if scenarios that once required specialized software and an advisor across the table.
AI speeds this up. Instead of you having to know which calculation to run, a planning system that understands your household can flag something on its own: an opportunity, a tradeoff worth understanding, an alternative worth modeling.
Boldin AI already uses the context of your financial plan to surface opportunities and help you explore what to do next. Where we’re headed is a system that does this continuously, not just when you ask.
That’s a different experience than a retirement calculator, and different from bolting a chatbot to your accounts. The real opportunity is combining AI with a complete, rigorous model of someone’s financial life.
Vanguard and Boldin Are Solving the Same Problem From Opposite Ends
Vanguard is scaling the advisor. Boldin is scaling the person the advisor would otherwise serve.
| Vanguard + Altruist | Boldin | |
| Built for | Independent advisors and their clients | People managing their own plan |
| How it scales advice | Better technology so each advisor serves more clients | Better tools so each person can run a complete plan |
| Where AI shows up | Advisor workflows: trading, custody, billing, portfolio management | Understanding a household’s full financial picture and surfacing decisions directly |
| What it costs the client | Advisor fees still apply | Sophisticated planning available directly, with a fee-only advisor available when you want one |
Both approaches matter, but they solve the access problem differently. One makes the existing advice model more efficient; the other changes who can access sophisticated financial capability in the first place.
This Is Already How Boldin Users Plan
None of this is hypothetical. People using Boldin wanted to know whether they could retire, what their options meant, and how today’s choices ripple into the decades ahead, so they turned to the Boldin Planner to work through it themselves instead of waiting for an annual meeting with an advisor.
People don’t necessarily want more financial products or advice. They want to understand what’s possible, make better decisions, and feel confident moving forward.
That’s why we built Boldin, and why I think the next chapter of financial technology centers on making individuals much more capable.
Financial Planning Is Becoming a Continuous Decision System
We’ve treated financial planning as a noun for too long: a document, a projection, a set of assumptions frozen at one meeting. But financial lives don’t work that way. Markets move. Tax laws change. Kids and parents need help. We move, divorce, inherit, retire early, live longer.
Every one of those events affects a dozen other decisions. A useful plan is a decision system: something that watches for what changes and helps you decide what to do next. It continually helps you:
Understand
See your complete financial picture and know what’s happening in it.
Decide
Identify opportunities, compare your options, and weigh the consequences before you choose.
Act
Turn decisions into changes in your financial life, whether you do it yourself, use the technology directly, or bring in a financial advisor.
Monitor
Keep watching as your life and the world change, and flag when a decision deserves another look.
Understand → Decide → Act → Monitor. That’s the system we’re building toward at Boldin.
Financial Advisors Still Matter, and Boldin Builds With Them
Some financial decisions benefit enormously from human judgment. Some people want reassurance. Some situations are genuinely complicated, where the most valuable thing is a knowledgeable person looking at the whole picture and saying, “you can do this.”
Human expertise is scarce and expensive. Technology should let us use it where it creates the most value, rather than making it the price of admission for sophisticated planning. That’s why Boldin pairs the planner with Boldin Advisors, a team of fee-only, fiduciary CFP® professionals you can bring in for exactly the decisions that call for a second opinion.
The future includes people managing most of their financial life themselves, people working closely with an advisor, and millions of people moving between the two depending on the decision in front of them.
Investing Was Democratized. Financial Decision-Making Is Next.
One of the biggest shifts in financial services has been the democratization of investing:
- Costs collapsed.
- Information became widely available.
- Products once reserved for wealthy investors became accessible to almost everyone.
- Millions of people gained more control over their money.
But investing and knowing what to do with your assets are different skills. The industry solved the first. It hasn’t solved the second.
The Vanguard-Altruist deal is one more sign that the largest financial institutions see this same challenge. Some companies will make advisors more capable. Others will put more intelligence directly into people’s hands. The most useful systems will likely do both.
Whatever the mix, the outcome is the same: great financial guidance becomes abundant instead of scarce. A retiree with $50,000 and a family with $5 million should get the same quality of guidance about the decisions in front of them.
That’s the future we’re building.
