America's Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies 2024 - 9

2024 AMERICA'S MOST ADVISOR-FRIENDLY TRUST COMPANIES
all-in-one firms that can give them tax
advice, insurance, estate planning,
philanthropy, wealth transfers to future
generations and more.
Your clients want a holistic approach
with specialized expertise. They want
an advisor who is more than just a
go-between to the markets, that's
expected. They want an advisor who
can be a guardian of every aspect of
their financial lives.
As it happens, one of the top items on
their wish list is the ability to create and
use trusts. While an individual can run
a trust, the complexity and fiduciary
burden make it difficult-even unwise-
for an advisor to do so. The SEC has
ruled that any advisor who wants to
serve as trustee or trust administrator
will face expensive and onerous audits.
As a result, a third party needs to be
identified to serve as trustee.
Given the complexity of the task, this
will often be a specialized corporate
entity, a trust company or bank trust
department. Once again, as far as the
trust and its creators are concerned,
this can be a terrific solution.
The corporate trustee has the
resources and expertise to manage the
paperwork, meet the filing deadlines
and bear the fiduciary burden-but
in the past, that has resulted in the
advisor getting squeezed out of almost
every relationship.
To be considered advisor friendly, a
trust company must be able to pledge
that it will cooperate with you, not
compete against you. Unlike captive
trust departments that exist to give
their corporate parents-usually
wealth managers or banks-access
to your clients, these companies have
unbundled their wealth management
offering and can simply sell trust
administration as a separate service.
With these advisor friendly companies,
conflicts of interest are eliminated.
Very few of them could take over
active management of your clients'
trust assets if they wanted to, which
they don't, so you're able to stay right
where you are: carrying the ball and
earning the glory.
The trust industry is still filled with
companies looking to compete directly
with advisors for control of assets, but,
thankfully, their dominance is nowhere
near as complete as it once was.
Progressive trust companies know
that investment advisors are the best
people to handle the investments and
that running a trust provides enough of
a challenge on its own.
Similar to independent advisors, these
trust companies are not beholden
to outside corporate interests.
They rarely, if ever, have proprietary
investment products to sell or
commissions to capture. Very few will
insist on taking custody of the trust
assets, although many will do so if
the trust creator or his or her advisors
wants that to occur.
For a trust company to be considered
for the Wealth Advisor rankings, it
must go the extra mile to not only stay
out of your business, but also help
you build that business. Today, it's
not enough to passively do no harm.
A trust company needs to actively
support your efforts to differentiate
yourself as the advisor that highnet-worth
families consult when
they want to open a trust, integrate
it into their long-term financial plan
or simply squeeze better investment
performance out of an existing trust
fund.
Time and again, we see that marketing
support makes the difference between
success and failure when advisors add
trust services to their service platform.
The closer your administration partner
can take you to offering your clients
a " plug-and-play " solution, the faster
you will see concrete results in terms
of client retention and your own
marketing efforts.
Of course, you could spend endless
hours educating yourself and
preparing your own client materials,
but that's involves a significant
investment of in-house resources, not
to mention personal bandwidth, that
may not pay off for months or even
years. So, go ahead and lean on your
trust company partner-assuming, of
course, that it's up to the challenge.
THE TRUE MEANING OF
" ADVISOR FRIENDLY "
This year, only 12 trust companies
have been included in the book. We
cut a lot out. They didn't have the
vision.
Those that remain are true leaders
in the independent advisor-friendly
space, building on their past success
to put even more space between
themselves and the institutional
dinosaurs that really aren't more than
glorified custodians. They're ambitious
and full of innovative ideas, technology
and new ways to serve your clients
better, faster and more efficiently.
From Alaska to New Hampshire,
South Dakota to Tennessee, Nevada
to Delaware, these companies are
located across the map, clustering
wherever state statutes provide
favorable treatment for wealthy families
that they may not be able to get
at home. They're at every stage of
corporate evolution: Some are affiliated
with larger financial entities, others are
practically start-ups. Here, you'll find
everything from niche specialists to
across-the-board generalists.
What unites them is leadership and
the willingness to work with you on
your terms. To call these organizations
" advisor friendly " is actually an
understatement. These are " advisorcentric "
trust companies that have
made a special commitment to
eliminate conflicts of interest between
themselves and you.
9
America's Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies 2024

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