Every household, review and record on one system
Reviews live in a spreadsheet, paperwork in a shared drive and the books and records in five places. Bring all of it into one system your firm owns, and put AI teammates on the work between meetings. Your advisers still make every call.
A good firm, held together by its associates
Most firms your size run on the custodians’ portals, a portfolio system, a CRM and a dozen subscriptions in between. It works until review season and an exam request land in the same month.
- Review season runs on a spreadsheetEach associate builds the review book by hand: performance from the portfolio system, notes from the CRM, last year’s action items from someone’s inbox. For 1,400 households, every year.
- Paperwork comes back not in good orderA transfer form is missing one initial, the custodian sends it back, and nobody notices for nine days. The client asks where their money is before anyone else does.
- Books and records live in five placesEmail in one system, meeting notes in another, recordings and call logs in two more. When an examiner asks for every communication with one household, compliance spends two weeks assembling it.
- Money movement runs on a callback and a sticky noteA client emails at 11 p.m. for $40,000 toward a new roof. Someone verifies it by phone, keys it at the custodian and tracks it on a note until it lands.
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard
- Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise
- Zoom Workplace Pro
- RingCentral Core
- Otter Business
- Calendly Teams
- Zendesk Suite Team
- Asana Starter
- Mailchimp Standard
- QuickBooks Online Advanced
- Power BI Pro
$94,562$0 a year, at list price, for Brekke & Lowell’s 11 subscriptions
Brekke & Lowell Wealth PartnersMinneapolis, MinnesotaBrekke & Lowell plans and manages the savings of 1,400 households across Minnesota, most of them retired or close to it.
Arne Brekke and Carol Lowell left a bank trust department in 1994 and opened two rooms above a Linden Hills bookshop. Andre Whitfield joined as an associate in 2003 and became managing partner when the founders retired: 22 advisers, two offices, and eleven subscriptions around the custodians and the portfolio system.
- 75
- people
- 1,400
- households
- $3.1B
- under management
- 22
- advisers
Andre Whitfield Managing partnerDesigns Brekke & Lowell’s system with OpenLazarus in the film below.
Brekke & Lowell Wealth Partners is an invented example, not a client: a company like the ones we build for, made up to show how one would run on OpenLazarus. Its people, numbers and photographs are illustrative.
What Brekke & Lowell runs on it
The modules carry the firm’s names, and the AI teammates prepare, file and follow up on the same households its people do. The advisers decide.
- Households1,400 families, their accounts, documents and every conversation
- RequestsMoney movement and paperwork, each with an owner until it settles
- OnboardingNew households from signed agreement to funded accounts
- TranscriptsEvery review meeting written up and filed to the record
- DocumentsStatements, agreements and forms, archived on the firm’s own server
- PhoneSix lines for the service desk, recorded and archived
- FeesQuarterly advisory fees, calculated from the custodians’ values
- ReportsReviews on time, requests open and paperwork sent back
Priya RamanAIReview prepDrafted 23 review books for this week’s meetings and flagged 4 missing beneficiary forms
Sam OkaforAIClient servicePrepared 11 money movement requests, each verified by callback, for operations to release
Grace LindqvistAICompliance and recordsArchived 4,280 emails, 96 calls and 38 meeting transcripts to the books and records overnight
Helena VargaAIBillingRan the quarter’s fees across 3,900 accounts and held 3 new ones for proration
Companies like Brekke & Lowell usually start with Priya, Grace and Sam.
What it could change in a year
An illustrative estimate for Brekke & Lowell, worked from its example numbers: the subscriptions it would stop paying for, the hours its people would get back, and the paperwork that stops coming back.
- $31,200
- a year it would keep after paying for Lazarus, its server, six phone lines and an engineer’s time
- 4,100
- hours a year it would give back to the associates, the service desk and compliance
- 3%
- of new-account paperwork sent back not in good order, down from 14%
Example figures for an invented company. The savings and hours are worked out from its example tools and plan at list prices; the third figure is an illustrative goal, not a measured result.
Run your firm on a system you own
Tell OpenLazarus how your firm serves its households. You’ll see your system take shape in the conversation, with your names, your teammates and what it saves.
We have custodians and a portfolio system. Do we replace them?
No. The custodians hold the assets and the portfolio system keeps performance and billing values; Lazarus reads from both and writes back where it has to. It replaces the subscriptions around them: the CRM, the meeting and phone tools, the ticketing and the spreadsheets.
Does the AI give investment advice?
No. The teammates prepare, file and follow up: review books, paperwork, requests and records. Recommendations come from your advisers, and anything sent to a client that shows performance waits for a person to approve it.
How does it handle books and records?
Every email, message, call and meeting transcript in Lazarus is archived as it happens, on your firm’s own server, for as long as your retention policy says. When an examiner asks for one household’s communications, compliance searches one place.
Who decides what the AI is allowed to do?
You do, per teammate. Money never moves until a person releases it, a request to a bank account not on file stops for a callback, and a fee adjustment over $1,000 asks first. Every action is logged where compliance can see it.
How long does it take to set up?
The design takes one conversation with OpenLazarus, like the one in the film. Our engineers then connect your custodians’ data feeds, your portfolio system and your phone lines and move your CRM, usually within a few weeks for a firm Brekke & Lowell’s size.