Altruist, the technology-driven custodian built for independent financial advisors, has secured another vote of confidence by securing an exclusive partnership with a newly independent billion-dolla firm in Boston.
The upstart RIA custody platform has announced Wednesday that Civic Financial, a Boston-based advisory firm overseeing roughly $1 billion in client assets, will move its entire custodial and technology operation to the Altruist platform.
The deal is the latest in a string of enterprise-level wins for the Los Angeles-based firm as it continues to garner attention from larger, faster-growing independent advisory practices.
Civic Financial is fully owned by its partners and claims organic growth of more than 40% annually, according to a statement announcing the new partnership. The firm, which serves high-net-worth families through a planning-led approach, said it evaluated every major player before ultimately selecting Altruist.
"We conducted extensive diligence across every major custodian and platform," said Scott DeSantis, chief executive of Civic Financial, who was previously affiliated with Northwestern Mutual for more than 10 years. He added that the process reinforced the firm's commitment to independence and pointed to Altruist's technology, leadership alignment and client-focused approach as deciding factors.
Jason Wenk, founder and chief executive of Altruist, framed the deal as validation of the firm's strategy to court larger, growth-oriented advisory shops. "When a firm with Civic Financial's sophistication, scale, and growth trajectory chooses Altruist for its entire business, that's a meaningful signal," Wenk said.
Civic Financial's decision to anchor its entire technology infrastructure to Altruist makes it something of an outlier in the wider independent advisory space, where multi-custodial setups are more the norm. One 2024 study by Interactive Brokers found roughly two-thirds of advisors use at least two custodians, including 34% who have three or more. According to that poll, the diversification across custodians is driven by client preferences, service availability, and variations in investment product offerings.
Being polygamous when it comes to custody does have its downsides. Separate research by F2 Strategy found that advisors using multiple custodians have to grapple with workflow complexity, with two-thirds of those spreading their custodial relationships saying they do so to prevent client disruption during a transfer rather than having a specific strategic purpose.
Read more: Can you have too many custodians?
As part of its tech transition, Civic Financial said it plans to become a design partner for Altruist's artificial intelligence engine, Hazel, applying it to tax planning, workflow automation and custom AI-driven processes.
The Civic Financial agreement follows another deal in June, when Holistic Planning, a $1.25 billion advisory firm, named Altruist its preferred custodian and committed roughly $450 million in assets to the platform. The Texas-based firm cited Altruist's application programming interface connectivity and its alternative investments marketplace as central to its decision, and said it intends to build HolisticOS, an agentic operating system for advisors, on top of the Altruist infrastructure.
Altruist has also been expanding what its platform can offer beyond custody. In early June, the company added alternative assets, margin, options and faster money-movement capabilities, giving advisors access to strategies once limited to institutional investors. The alternatives marketplace took off with offerings from Blackstone, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, KKR and Pantheon, and Altruist said it charges no custody fees on those partner funds at launch.
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