TrustAdvisor Announces Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies for 2015
MARINA DEL REY, Calif., Jan. 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Dozens of independent trust companies have spawned over the past decade with the goal of cooperating with investment advisors instead of competing head-to-head for client assets. Now a long-running annual industry list reveals that it's time those next-generation firms needs to go an extra mile to differentiate itself.
More stringent evaluation criteria pushed nine previously rated companies out of Trust Advisor's newly released 2015 Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies rankings, available at http://advisorfriendly.com. As a result, an audience of approximately 500,000 wealth managers and other financial service professionals now have a more exclusive pre-vetted short list of potential partners to work with – only the truly "advisor-friendly" firms need apply.
"In previous years we gave the trust companies' internal messaging more weight," says Scott Martin, Trust Advisor senior editor. "Unfortunately, the gap between messaging and reality meant the list was getting bigger but its usefulness to advisors was going in the other direction. We've fixed that now."
Past iterations of the Advisor-Friendly list gave equal treatment to all trust companies willing to come forward and announce their willingness to work with advisors instead of simply rolling trust assets into their internal wealth management platforms, taking the accounts, associated fees and, often, the relationships away from the very people who initially recommended a trust to their clients.
As of 2015, truly "advisor-friendly" companies now need to demonstrate their commitment to actively helping partners grow their businesses – through marketing support, client education and shared in-house expertise – and push back against the bundled all-in-one vendors that made so many advisors leery of the trust industry in the first place.
Many of the companies that remain on the Trust Advisor list have already gone beyond the basics, differentiating themselves as leaders in various jurisdictions, specialized forms of trust arrangement or the administration of unusual asset classes.
"It's always going to boil down to chemistry, but simply knowing what a given firm does best helps speed the process of finding the right match," Martin says. "We know advisors don't have time to interview 30 trust companies. Narrowing the focus to the ones that add concrete value brings the Advisor-Friendly universe back down to a manageable size."
The 2015 list and profiles of the top-ranked trust companies are available to download http://advisorfriendly.com.
SOURCE The Trust Advisor
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