Competition for wealthy clients has never been more intense. Wealth managers must be actively enhancing their traditional investment management services by offering more sophisticated investment, estate, financial, charitable and tax planning services to their best, most profitable customers.
In today’s market, advisors who want to differentiate themselves, provide more value to their clients, and increase their assets under management—may need to offer trust services.
The challenge is that offering trust services can be complex, from onboarding clients to managing jurisdictional questions; and so advisors tend to wait until a client is ill or even passes away. But by then, it may be too late.
In this special briefing, you’ll learn the fastest way to begin offering trust services to your clients—from anywhere in the country. And you’ll see whether you qualify for a private label trust company option that offers you all the benefits of trust services, including continuing to maintain your client relationships, without the hassle of establishing your own trust entity.
Why Trust Services Are the Ideal Way to Enhance Your Client Relationships and Provide New Income Streams
Trust services are becoming increasingly popular among the wealthiest families and individuals because they control the disposition of assets to beneficiaries, assign a high level of fiduciary responsibility and ensure a solid structure for future safety and growth. If properly constructed, trusts can carry out asset disposition in a tax efficient way.
Trust companies act as trustees for their clients, serving as a fiduciary as they administer, manage and eventually transfer assets for their clients. Where broker-dealers and registered investment advisors are required only to select suitable investments for their clients, trustees must make every decision in the best interests of their clients.
Trust companies also have the ability to structure wealth distribution in sophisticated ways, providing the most tax efficient (and beneficiary attentive) methods of transferring a broad variety of assets, including unique interests such as closely held businesses, family heirlooms, farm land, customized annuities or limited partnerships and different methods of charitable giving. Trusts can also contain language dealing with longer term intergenerational planning.
All of these elements provide considerable value to your clients and make you more indispensable to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals and families.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Spectrem Group, there are over 10.8 million households in the United States with assets over $1 million. The same report says:
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9.4 million have a net worth of $1 million to $5 million
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1.3 million have a net worth of $5 million to $25 million
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156,000 households are worth more than $25 million
Just as important, many of these high net worth investors are entering a critical period for estate planning, the end of working life and the beginning of retirement.
How to Find the Right Trust Partner for Serving Every Client
State chartered trust companies—while increasingly popular—face operational impediments when asked to serve outside their home state borders. And thus, providing the best possible guidance to your clients can be a tricky balancing act, if only limited to a state chartered trust company.
For instance, in the real estate business, delivering advice and trust services to your clients is a matter of location. The jurisdictional home of the trust, its trustee, participants, and assets will determine the fine points of administration, asset protection, duration, privacy, stakeholder influence and tax treatment, both income and estate.
The reality is that wealthy families often lead complex and multi-state lifestyles. Such complexity is exacerbated when you consider the generational interdependence of family wealth.
State chartered trust companies often possess too many constraints to meet the long-term and multi-generational wealth management sophistication your clients demand. In response to this reality, a staggering amount of trust assets every year land with nationally chartered trust companies empowered to operate on every inch of U.S. soil.
The problem is that most national charters are maintained by large financial institutions, such as a bank or wealth management complex with no corporate culture of independence. Such institutions have a well-earned reputation for using their trustee role to prospect accounts away from the advisors who built them. They possess deeply rooted cross-selling DNA, driven to seek profit from wealth management services at the expense of the independent advisors who established, cultivated and flourished the client relationship.
The Most Flexible National Trust Solution
National Advisors Trust Company (NATC), with its national and South Dakota charters, may be the only company enabled to walk the entire trust tightrope from end to end. It maintains both a national trust charter and a progressive state trust charter to provide its trusted advisor partners the best of both worlds. The national charter allows the firm to deliver trust services across all 50 states, while their South Dakota charter provides clients access to the country’s premier progressive jurisdiction.
National Advisors was formed by independent advisors with a simple goal in mind – to provide best in class, nationwide trust administration in a fiercely independent and non-competing environment. National Advisors Trust Company, pursues this goal every day, serving advisors in 45 states and trusts across the nation.
National Advisors Trust Company is currently looking to partner with a handful of qualified advisors on a more advanced strategic partnership that includes support with sales, marketing, and more. This process is designed to empower advisors to invest more time in service of clients, including offering trust services, and to acquire new clients.
To find out if you’re an ideal candidate for this partnership with NATC, click here to go through this 3-minute qualification process.
With so many clients in the baby boomer generation moving toward passing on and leaving assets to family members—and given that a recent survey in Financial Advisor Magazine found that 70% of widows had fired their advisors within a year of the husband’s death—time is of the essence.
