America’s Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies Showcase - Flipbook - Page 13
2026 AMERICA’S MOST ADVISOR-FRIENDLY TRUST COMPANIES
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 replace your
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.
Taking a page from the independent
advisory business model and
ethos, 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.
Remember, for a trust company to be
listed here, 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 high-net-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 have seen
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
marketing efforts.
Of course, you could spend endless
hours educating yourself and preparing
your client materials, but that effort
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.
RACING THE CLOCK
Investors are almost universally
frustrated with raw investment
performance as the basis for their
advisory relationship. At this point, an
automated computer program can
match the market for a fraction of the
cost—and matching the market is not
always terribly impressive in itself.
Trust services create the kind of
deeper, value-added relationship
that provides the long-term structure
that keeps clients from drifting away.
Assets held in trust can remain in
place in perpetuity, accumulating
wealth across multiple generations of
clients and keeping the fees flowing
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for decades. Obviously, this is why
banks and other institutions keep
chasing these assets and never let
them go once they grab hold of them.
While this area of the industry is
practically essential to high-net-worth
investors, only a minority of advisors
have built the necessary network of
relationships to help clients transfer
their wealth into trusts. It takes time
and effort to find the right partner,
and with so many trust service
organizations fighting for a place at
the table, the cost of settling on the
wrong partner is far too high.
Most trust service organizations
are affiliated with banks or asset
management firms that want to take
over the way the money is invested.
Many funnel the cash into proprietary
products. Others simply exploit their
access to your best clients in order
to prospect a greater share of the
overall assets away from legacy
advisors and into their own books of
business. These organizations tend
to compete with, rather than partner
with, advisors.
These trust service organizations
may do a great job administering
trusts, but from an advisor’s point
of view, they’re far from trustworthy,
as they have no separation between
investment management and trust
administration. Anyone who refers
clients to these de facto competitors
is effectively giving a rival open license
to take over the accounts.
The good news, of course, is that
dozens of trust companies (even
those affiliated with banks or asset
management firms) have developed
a business model nimble and efficient
enough to cooperate with advisors.
