AI platforms Hazel and Avantos pressure bank wealth units to modernize as independent channel accelerates

AI Summary

• →Altruist's launch of Hazel, an AI-based tax planning capability built via its 2025 acquisition of startup Thyme, triggered an estimated $130 billion market value wipeout across Raymond James, Charles Schwab, and LPL Financial within two days, while bank wealth divisions were largely spared due to structural insulation.
• →Hazel combines meeting intelligence, live custodial data, and tax planning into a single advisor environment, enabling productivity expansion and proactive next-best-action engagement for advisors managing large, heterogeneous books.
• →Avantos, a recently launched AI-native platform for institutional wealth management, layers a knowledge graph across core systems to enable advisors, servicing teams, and AI agents to operate with shared context, with Mercer Advisors reporting active deployment across tens of thousands of clients.
• →Bank wealth units face three key investment areas to capture this opportunity: data completeness, supervisory workflow with compliance architecture, and change management for captive advisor adoption.
• →Datos Insights positions Hazel as a competitive reference point for bank wealth leaders and Avantos as the more actionable institutional-scale opportunity.