Why Financial Advisors Shouldn't Ignore Trusts

06/16/2025

Why Financial Advisors Who Ignore Trusts Are Leaving Money and Clients on the Table

Integrated estate planning is an opportunity you can’t afford to ignore as a financial advisor. If you don't offer trust establishment and administration services, you may struggle to retain clients. You may also miss out on new clients who want to pass their wealth to loved ones and maintain their legacy upon their passing.

Advisor-client relationships are built on a foundation of deep, enduring trust. Your clients give you access to some of their most personal and sensitive information. This means you have a unique opportunity to build long-term, authentic relationships with them and their descendants. You can nurture partnerships with families that last for generations, helping your clients achieve multigenerational prosperity and growing your firm’s wealth and reputation.

Discover the inherent problems with ignoring trusts in your financial advisory firm and how partnering with a reputable trust company to provide holistic trust services can close this gap and carve out a lasting competitive advantage.

Trusts Are a Blind Spot in Financial Planning

Too many advisors neglect to integrate trusts into their service offerings because they assume their clients will hire outside estate attorneys to handle estate planning. This is an outdated concept. Trusts are a crucial component of financial planning for individuals, couples, and families, and estate planning can’t be separated from retirement or tax planning. It's part of the big picture for your clients and their loved ones.

People from all walks of life, from ultra-high-net-worth individuals to middle-class families, can benefit from estate planning to pass on their wealth and preserve their legacy. By integrating trust services into your practice, you can attract new clients and maintain relationships with existing ones.

Offering such services gives you the chance to:

Build a reputation as a holistic financial advisory firm
Bring in assets-under-management (AUM) retention opportunities
Explore intergenerational wealth-transfer strategies
Attract clients who are seeking comprehensive planning
Avoid leaving substantial assets and revenue on the table

You don’t have to be a family attorney to offer estate-planning services. You can partner with dedicated trust companies to integrate trust establishment and management planning into your existing services.

Why Trusts Should Be Part of Your Advisory Firm

Trusts are an essential component of comprehensive financial planning for many of your clients. But trust planning isn’t a standard offering for most financial advisory firms. Why not? In most cases, financial advisors aren’t qualified (or don’t feel qualified) to offer these services. But that doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate them.

By partnering with a reputable trust company, you can expand your offerings and gain the advantages of providing integrated estate-planning services at your practice.

1. Clients Want Comprehensive Financial Guidance

People are less likely to invest their future in a financial advisor if they’re missing out on a core piece of the puzzle. Your clients need to be able to trust you with their current wealth and their financial future.

A trust is a key piece of any financial journey, and you’ll almost certainly miss out on long-term clients if you ignore this crucial service. To build long-term partnerships and foster relationships with your current clients’ beneficiaries, an integrated approach is essential.

Comprehensive trust management helps you achieve important goals for your clients, such as:

Tax minimization: Trusts can be powerful vehicles for reducing or avoiding income, estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes for your clients.
Charitable giving: Some types of trusts can allow your clients to support charities they care about in a flexible and tax-efficient way.
Future care planning: Trusts are essential tools in planning for long-term care and support for aging clients and those with disabilities or other health issues.
Business succession: If your clients have business interests, trusts can provide tax efficiency, control, and legal clarity in succession planning.
Legal asset protection: The right trust strategies offer legal protections, shielding your clients' assets from lawsuits, creditors, or divorcing spouses.

2. Integrated Trust Services Lead to Better AUM Retention

Trust services aren’t just important for attracting a wider and more diverse client base. They can also help you retain your existing AUM.

When loyal clients pass away or are no longer able to make financial decisions on their own behalf, their assets are often distributed to heirs, liquidated, or transferred to other advisory firms. This poses a significant risk that can be mitigated by offering trust services.

Assets held in a trust are much more likely to stay under management because:

The trust endures after your client’s incapacity or death.
The successor trustee often remains with the advisor and continues to manage the assets.
The terms of the trust may encourage or direct the successor to maintain professional management.

Trusts are inherently a long-term, multigenerational concern. Real-estate properties, custodial accounts, investment portfolios, and other assets often span generations. Trusts help facilitate the transfers of these assets.

This gives you the chance to extend your professional relationships and maintain AUM as your clients age or pass away and transfer their wealth. You’ll meet the beneficiaries of the trust early on, affording you the opportunity to establish yourself as a trusted advisor and participate in important family conversations.

3. You Can Collaborate (Instead of Compete) With Estate Planners

Estate planners and financial advisors each have their own specialties, but the services they offer are highly complementary. You don’t want to lose out on enduring client relationships (or funds) because your client has to seek out other financial professionals to get the complete financial planning they need. Instead of competing with estate planners, you can work with them to ensure your services are truly comprehensive.

Working with a dedicated trust planning company enables you to offer more sophisticated, integrated strategies to your clients. This can significantly boost your credibility with high-net-worth clients and upper-middle-class families alike.

A collaborative approach does more than fine-tune your services. It expands your horizons, positioning you as a holistic financial guide for your clients and their descendants. It also strengthens your professional network, providing a wider range of opportunities and elevating your reputation. This type of collaborative advantage can give you a competitive edge, help you identify new opportunities, and protect you from regulatory issues.

4. You’ll Capture New Assets as Existing Clients Receive Their Inheritance

Understanding family dynamics is a crucial aspect of a financial advisor’s role. This is especially true when it comes to sensitive, multigenerational concerns such as estate planning and trust establishment. By achieving a balanced, empathy-focused, yet practical approach, you’ll become an invaluable resource and a trusted partner for the entire family.

You can maintain your existing AUM after your current clients’ incapacitation or passing when their beneficiaries choose to remain with your firm. But you also have the opportunity to absorb new assets held by these beneficiaries prior to receiving their inheritance. This is a streamlined method of organically expanding your AUM to include new generations of clients.

5. Trust Services Help Build Trust With Clients and Their Families

When your clients pass away or can no longer manage their own funds, their beneficiaries are often left with a significant weight of grief during this major life event. In such circumstances, you are there to help your clients and their families feel supported and secure in their financial futures.

Offering trust services positions you as more than an advisor. You can become a true friend and partner in difficult times. This is an opportunity to demonstrate to your clients that you care about more than just their finances. You care about their children, the charitable causes they value, and their legacy. You can show them how you’ll be there after they pass to guide their heirs through the frustration and pain of losing someone they’ve loved and relied on.

Losing a parent, grandparent, or other loved one is a confusing and difficult time for anyone. Dealing with practical concerns can feel overwhelming. When you offer guidance on inheritance, taxes, portfolio management, and other financial matters, you provide grieving clients with the support and freedom they need to make informed decisions, allowing them to focus on what truly matters.

6. Trusts Aren’t Just for High-Net-Worth Clients

Put aside the old-fashioned idea that trusts are exclusively for ultra-high-net-worth families. In the modern financial world, it's not just the wealthy who need trust establishment and administration services. Trusts are about more than money. They’re also about interpersonal relationships, responsibility, and agency.

Regardless of the monetary value of their assets, your clients deserve to know that their estate will be allocated according to their personal wishes. Trusts are especially important for clients with complex or non-traditional families and business interests.

Here are examples of clients who can benefit from trust services, regardless of net worth:

Blended families: Blended families face unique challenges with regard to inheritance, and a trust helps ensure clarity and preserve family relationships.
Small business owners: Small business owners often have specific succession goals that certain types of trusts can help facilitate.
Clients with no human beneficiaries: A purpose trust is designed to plan for unique posthumous goals, such as establishing long-term pet care, preserving land, or maintaining artifacts.
Parents with children who have special needs: A special-needs trust helps ensure beneficiaries receive supplemental income and support without facing the loss of government benefits.
Charitable clients: A trust can allow clients to distribute their wealth to charitable organizations in a tax-efficient way.
Retirees and pre-retirees: Trusts and retirement planning services provide your clients with the long-term care and wealth-preservation strategies they need during their golden years.

How To Incorporate Trust Services Into Your Practice

Adding trusts to your existing service offerings may seem complicated, but you don’t have to be an estate attorney to expand your practice. It’s about understanding your existing client base, identifying new opportunities, and building partnerships with trust experts that complement your core set of skills.

The right approach depends on your clients' needs and your long-term vision for your business. Here’s a simplified breakdown of how to incorporate trust services into your current advisory practice:

Identify client needs: Do your research on what “trust services” mean to your clients and how they fit into their overall financial journey and goals.
Find your partners: Unless you’re an expert on trusts, you need partners who understand the legal, financial, and strategic components of establishing and implementing trusts.
Research trusts: You don’t need to be a lawyer, but you need to understand the key types of trusts, tax implications, funding mechanisms, trustee responsibilities, and how trusts affect overall finances.
Integrate your services: Coordinate with your chosen partners to determine how trust services can be effectively integrated into your practice and ensure you’re all working toward the same client goals.
Promote trust services: Don’t forget to market on your digital and print promotional materials so your existing and prospective clients know you offer these additional services.

As you broaden your horizons and expand your professional partnerships, stay true to your core mission. Providing additional services and working with other financial professionals can open up a whole new world of opportunities, but it should never come at the expense of your identity and values as an advisor.

Find a partner you truly trust, and make sure you’re upfront about your goals and your clients' needs. You know your clients better than anyone, and you have their best interests at heart.

Strengthen Your Competitive Advantage With Arden Trust

You want the best for your clients. Offering integrated financial services provides them with the support they need, while also positioning your firm for long-term success.

At Arden Trust, we work with financial advisors to expand their offerings and provide their clients with the specialized estate planning and trust management they need to secure their legacy and support future generations.

We’re here to help expand your unique relationships with your clients. We’ll never tell you how to run your business. Instead, we design our solutions to integrate seamlessly with your existing processes, allowing you to provide your clients with the holistic financial planning and support they need to thrive.