America’s Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies Showcase - Flipbook - Page 22
2026 AMERICA’S MOST ADVISOR-FRIENDLY TRUST COMPANIES
You shouldn’t have to educate yourself
in the intimate workings of the trust
code just to sell yourself as an advisor
who works with these vehicles.
All you should need to do is let
your partner provide the marketing
materials you need. Any trust
company that’s winning new accounts
probably has a library of white
papers, newsletter articles, and other
informational content that it distributes
to its prospective clients. Volunteer
to pass it on to your clients and
prospects as well.
Tapping your trust partner’s expertise
in marketing trust-oriented financial
planning techniques doesn’t diminish
your central role in your clients’
eyes. At worst, all you’ll be doing is
demonstrating without a shadow of
a doubt that you are a professional
who knows whom to contact for
support on specialized topics. More
likely, your clients will simply start
thinking of you as the person who
knows about trusts.
In any case, a real advisor-friendly
trust company won’t make you
reinvent the marketing wheel. They’ve
already done the heavy lifting to
support their business, and besides,
if you end up convincing any of your
clients to create a trust, the trust
company is the one who benefits.
Your success is its success. A real
partner should do whatever it takes to
make that happen—and it should be
proactive enough to volunteer its help
before you ask.
When interviewing a potential partner,
find out about the marketing support.
This service is not necessarily a
deal-breaker, but the more the trust
company can help you establish your
role as a trust advisor, the faster this
relationship will pay off for you both.
For any advisor-friendly trust company,
business for you is good for them.
WHAT DO THEY CHARGE?
Naturally, corporate trustees need
to charge for their services. While
regulators are pushing for greater
transparency here, this fee is often allinclusive or bundled in such a way that
beneficiaries and their advisors have
a hard time determining where the
money goes.
Traditional all-in-one trust companies
further obscure the cash flows by
charging a fee that compensates them
for their investment management
services, fiduciary risk, and other
“soft, non-value-added services”
provided to clients.
Directed trusts, on the other hand,
generally separate the investment
advisory fee from the corporate
trustee fee. As a result, their clients
receive much clearer insight into what
they are paying—and often a lower
total fee as well.
In general, fee schedules for directed
trust companies fall in a range from
0.50% to 0.75% on the first $1 million,
and then drop according to varying
breakpoints thereafter. Minimum
annual fees range at about $4,000
regardless of asset level, although
some types of trust start in the $1,500
range. A few vendors will charge a
flat fee for any amount of assets.
Additional fees may apply for real
estate held in trust, estate settlement
and termination fees, tax preparation
and/or filing, or miscellaneous
extraordinary services.
Note: The IRS has ruled that all
corporate trustees are required to
separately account for investment and
administration fees. This obligation is
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intended to remove the tax advantage
of a “unitary” trust in which the
entire trustee fee can be deducted,
as opposed to a trust that charges
separate fees and allows only partial
deductibility of fees. Directed trusts
already break out the fees in this
way, but because this development
is relatively new, it gives you a good
“talking point” in your negotiations
with trust companies.
TECHNOLOGY THAT
SETS YOU APART
The right accounting platform can
interface with modern state-of-theart portfolio management tools that
directed and delegated advisors use
today, while also incorporating your
best tax optimization and rebalancing
strategies. The investment architecture
can now be truly open, working with
any third-party or in-house alternative
assets your platform supports.
Integrated multi-custodian data feeds
allow the administrators of large trusts
to track thousands of open investment
positions, report market values, and
attribute performance with a minimum
of delay and errors. This functionality,
in turn, is what makes the very
existence of smaller trusts possible.
A modern trust administrator may be
able to share data with your customer
relationship management system and
provide other integration benefits. If
this kind of efficiency matters to you,
it’s important to ask a potential partner
whether they can provide it.
But the primary advantage technology
is bringing to the trust business is the
elimination of paper. Moving the forms
into secure paperless environments
has been essential for a new
generation of trust officers who can
now give beneficiaries, grantors, and
