Episode summary
Inside Altruist's Hazel Financial Planning Agent
Resilient Advisor Podcast
· · 50 min · Guests: Fernando San Martin Jorquera
Summary
Fernando San Martin Jorquera says Hazel’s new financial planning agent is meant to compress the most time-consuming part of planning from hours into minutes. He argues that the biggest leverage comes from intelligent client profiles: Hazel connects to a firm’s email, calendar, CRM, custodians, and note-taking workflow, then assembles a household-level picture of the client and surfaces what is most relevant. He says the tool is designed to move advisers from data entry into an approval role, while still letting them verify every fact and trace it back to the source.
The episode spends a lot of time on setup and data hygiene. Fernando says Hazel can ingest Wealthbox, Redtail, Salesforce, HubSpot, notes, tasks, emails, and meeting transcripts, and that it supports either household or contact-level workflows, though he believes most advisers prefer households. He also notes that documents such as 1040s and account statements still need to be uploaded manually for now, although document integrations are on the roadmap.
On the planning side, Fernando shows how Hazel can generate a full plan across retirement, cash flow, investments, insurance, tax, and estate topics. The plan is customizable by persona and layout, includes source-linked figures, scenario modeling, and decision tracking, and can be used with imported plans from other tools like Right Capital, MoneyGuidePro, or eMoney.
Key takeaways
- Fernando says Hazel can generate financial plans for an entire client base in minutes instead of hours after setup.
- Hazel’s client profiles pull from CRM, email, calendar, notes, tasks, and custodial data, with two-way sync for many fields.
- Fernando says most advisers he sees work at the household level, though Hazel supports contact-level workflows too.
- Documents are not yet auto-synced from SharePoint, Google Drive, or CRM storage, but that integration is on the roadmap.
- The planning module can be customized by client persona, plan layout, and assumptions, then drilled into source-level figures and calculations.
Notable quotes
“the average advisor spends about 18 hours in building a financial plan”
“You can generate financial plans for your entire client base uh in minutes instead of hours”
“Hazel joins as a bot to your meetings”
“Most people think about household first and context second”
“the worst version you'll ever see of this product”
How the episode opens
Every adviser watching this knows what a financial plan costs to build. Not in dollars, in hours. Gathering the data, drafting, review most of a work week before you ever sit down with a client could be consumed by these tasks.
Recently, the team at Hazel shipped a tool that claims to help compress that first stretch into a matter of minutes. It's called the Hazel Financial Planning Agent. My guest today helped build this tool and on this podcast he is going to walk you through how to start using this tool in your practice quickly.
We're going to walk through how to connect your existing CRM, how to connect your email and your calendar, how to build ideal client pro intelligent client profiles, and then how to use their robust AIdriven planning agent. I'm Jay Coulter and this is the Resilient Advisor Show. Welcome to this episode of the Resilient Advisor Show where we bring industry experts to help you build your business your way.
My name is Jay Coulter and my guest today is Fernando San Martin. Fernando, thanks for coming on.
Thank you for having me. All right, big news out of Hazel in Altruist with the launch of the planning agent. It's getting a lot of media buzz.
I'm having questions come in from my advisor community about how to best use the tool and asking what my thoughts are. I'm only three or four days into the demo myself. So, I appreciate you coming on.
Let's create a situation where advisers can learn how to quickly start using this planning tool. Uh before we get started, in one sentence, as somebody who helped build this tool, what does this planning agent do that Hazel could not do three months ago?
Yeah. And and first and foremost, thank you for for having us and giving us the float and the opportunity to participate in the podcast.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- financial planning workflow
- crm data integration
- client profile setup
- automated plan generation
- scenario modeling
Companies and tickers mentioned
- Altruist
- Hazel
Watch the episode
Watch “Inside Altruist's Hazel Financial Planning Agent” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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Resilient Advisor Podcast, this episode and its artwork belong to Jay Coulter, CFP®, CIMA®. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
