At a recent industry conference, Ken Lako, President & Chief Executive Officer of Members Trust Company (MTC), opened with estate planning basics. The room was engaged, questions were flowing, and then the conversation turned to bifurcated trusts—what the model means for advisors, their clients, and how a partnership with a corporate trustee can work in practice. Lako never made it to another topic. “I didn’t get to a single slide after that,” he says.
The response is telling. Advisors across the country are waking up to a model that removes a long-standing friction point in client relationships—and Members Trust Company has built its entire approach around making that model work. With a federally chartered trust company handling the administrative and fiduciary side while the advisor continues managing assets, clients receive institutional backing without sacrificing the relationship they’ve spent years building. Nobody has to walk away. MTC has been quietly perfecting the structure for years, and advisors are paying attention.
The Relationship Nobody Wants to Break
For many clients, the moment they realize they need a corporate trustee is also the moment they fear losing their financial advisor. It’s a true tension that has pushed plenty of families toward arrangements that didn’t serve them well.
Lako has seen the pattern play out more times than he can count. Clients reach a crossroads—maybe a trust is being established, maybe a family situation has grown more complex—and suddenly they’re weighing a decade-long advisory relationship against institutional trustee requirements.
“Historically, they might’ve had a financial advisor that they really liked, but they came to that point in their life or their family situation where they needed a corporate trustee,” he says. “And they were forced to make that hard choice between, do I go with a corporate trustee A, B, or C, or do I stay with a financial advisor who I know and love and worked with me for a decade? They don’t have to make that choice anymore.”
MTC’s model is built on preserving what clients already value. The firm works alongside advisors, not around them. “First and foremost, we go to great lengths to preserve that advisor-client relationship,” Lako emphasizes. “And I think that’s how teams work. It’s not us against you in any way, shape, or form. It’s you and I working together for the benefit of the people who have entrusted us with their wealth.”
What Advisors Are Looking For
Members Trust Company signed more than 20 new RIA firms in 2025, Lako says, along with two significant broker-dealer relationships—the latter opening access to upwards of 20,000 financial advisors on the firm’s approved platform. Growth at a clip roughly equivalent to one new RIA partnership every two weeks doesn’t happen by accident, and Lako has a clear read on what’s driving those flows.
Credibility comes first. Advisors want to know a trust company can deliver on what it promises. But close behind credibility is something more elusive: service.
“There’s a gap in service levels,” Lako says, pointing to the divide between large institutional firms and smaller boutiques. MTC aims to occupy the middle ground—the credentials and capabilities of a national firm, with the accessibility and responsiveness of a boutique. In practice, the firm’s team includes professionals with JDs, LLMs, CFA® designations, CFPs, and CTFAs, and Lako is reachable directly by phone or email, a point he makes without hesitation.
The firm’s chartering by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) within the U.S. Department of the Treasury is another meaningful differentiator. Because Members Trust Company is federally chartered, it can serve clients in all 50 states without requiring advisors or attorneys to restructure existing arrangements. “We meet clients and we meet partners where they are, how they want to work, not how we think it should work,” adds Lako.
No redirecting clients toward a specific jurisdiction just to fit the trust company’s preferences. No telling an advisor to go back and redraft documents before the conversation can move forward.
Expanding the Footprint, State by State
MTC has always been a nationally chartered trust company, but 2025 brought a more deliberate geographic push. The firm opened a physical office in Las Vegas, driven in part by strong West Coast demand—particularly from California-based advisors and estate planning attorneys who have long gravitated toward Nevada as a preferred trust jurisdiction. West Coast wealth concentration has made Nevada a natural fit, and having boots on the ground there means the firm can meet those clients and partners face to face rather than across a time zone.
“We’re going to great lengths to really make sure that we can meet people in person and, again, do what they want to do, given the level of service they can’t get anywhere else,” Lako explains.
The Nevada office complements existing locations in Tampa, Florida (the firm’s corporate headquarters); Fairfax, Virginia; and Denver, Colorado. MTC also has more than 20 team members distributed across the country and is actively building out a presence in South Dakota—a jurisdiction with well-established appeal in the trust and estate planning world. For advisors with clients spread across multiple states, the expanded footprint means more in-person access to Members Trust Company’s team without sacrificing the consistency of working with a single, nationally chartered institution.
Special Needs Trusts: Filling a Real Gap
Throughout its expansion, MTC has remained committed to serving clients many trust companies turn away. Finding a corporate trustee willing to administer a special needs trust has become harder than most advisors realize. The work is high-touch, the compliance requirements are exacting, and the stakes for beneficiaries are significant. Many firms have quietly stepped back from the space.
MTC hasn’t. “I’ve always been proud of our special needs trust capabilities,” Lako says. “What I was shocked at though was the number of people looking for trustees who will take special needs trust these days, and they’re few and far between.”
The demand he encountered at a recent estate planning conference—from advisors actively searching for a trustee willing to do the work—reinforced just how wide the gap has grown.
His firm’s willingness to stay in the space comes from something deeper than a business development calculation.
“At the end of the day, that’s why a lot of us got into this business in the first place,” he says. “We truly, genuinely want to serve people and—as opposed to a zero-sum game—at the end of the day, we’re doing good things for people.”
Building the Infrastructure to Back It All Up
As Members Trust Company continues to add partners, the firm is also focusing on significant internal investment. Two major technology projects are currently underway, which Lako describes as the largest in MTC’s history. One is a broad platform transformation already in progress. The other is a full trust accounting system conversion—the kind of foundational infrastructure overhaul that touches nearly every corner of the operation.
“When I first joined Members Trust Company three years ago, there was a trust conversion system in process, and I stopped it,” he admits. “I didn’t want to do it. It’s a big expense. It’s very time consuming. It’s very stressful, but it did get to the point in our organization that if we want to be the best that we can be, which is something we strive to be every day, it became obvious that we had to do that.”
A trust accounting conversion is the kind of investment most clients will never see—and that’s precisely the point. It’s the work a firm takes on when the goal is building something durable rather than just functional. Across every dimension—technology, talent, geography, and service commitment—Members Trust Company is constructing a platform designed to carry significantly more weight. For RIAs evaluating trust partners, the question isn’t just who can handle a trust today. It’s who will still be growing, investing, and improving five years from now. And Members Trust Company has a clear answer.
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