Category: Press

National Advisors Trust Partners with Dynasty Financial Partners

Kansas City, MO | February 27, 2020

Partnership Combines Trust Services & Wealth Management Capabilities to Create a Comprehensive Solution for Advisors & Their Affiliates

National Advisors Trust announced today that they have partnered with Dynasty Financial Partners to offer a combination of trust services and wealth management to financial advisors seeking to expand and unify their services to clients.

According to James A. Combs Jr., President and CEO, National Advisors Holdings, Inc.,

“National Advisors Trust is excited to be partnering with Dynasty Financial Partners to help advisors expand their products and service offerings to help them retain and consolidate client assets. Trust services are an essential component of any comprehensive wealth solution. When integrated with the Dynasty platform, National Advisors Trust’s solutions will help advisors unify the advice and planning processes. We welcome the opportunity to provide trust and custody solutions to its community of advisors.”

National Advisors Trust is a support system that will continue to enhance the Dynasty platform giving financial advisors a means to increase asset retention and consolidation.  This partnership is designed to provide a solution to the firms on Dynasty’s platform–and creates a readily available trust solution to the firm’s business model.

“The partnership between National Advisors Trust (NAT) and Dynasty has a singular focus—providing our Network Partner Firms with additional tools and resources to deliver to their clients.  We felt NAT’s client-centric focus fit well with our philosophy and we are excited about all of the potential synergies between the two firms,” said Austin Philbin, Chief Administrative Officer, Dynasty Financial Partners.

Who Is National Advisors

National Advisors is a family of companies providing expert trust, custody, and concierge services to trusted advisors and the families they serve nationwide.  

National Advisors Holdings, Inc. is a bank holding company governed by the Federal Reserve Bank. National Advisors’ wholly-owned subsidiaries include: National Advisors Trust Company, a non-depository trust company with a national banking association charter; National Advisors Trust of South Dakota, Inc., a state-chartered non-depository trust company; and National Advisors Concierge Services, an LLC that provides ancillary products and services to advisors. The headquarters for the industry-leading, independent, advisor-friendly trust platform is located in Kansas City, Missouri with satellite offices located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Houston, Texas. The companies serve trusted advisors of all types including RIAs, CPAs, banks, brokers, lawyers, and family offices.

Partnering with National Advisors is the ultimate trust relationship. You have spent years building relationships with clients who trust your judgment. You need a trust services partner you can depend on to help preserve and strengthen the enduring relationships you have created with your clients. Working together, we help you extend those relationships across generations. National Advisors Trust Company was the nation’s first independent, advisor-owned national trust company. It was founded, in part, as a response to the dominance that large banks and trust companies exerted over the trust services market. The concept is simple; allow trusted advisors to cultivate and maintain the crucial client relationships, while providing reliable trust administrative services. This not only makes trust services more widely available and affordable for clients, but it also gives independent advisors the ability to offer trust services without fear of losing their clients to the large banks and trust companies.

About Dynasty Financial Partners 

Dynasty Financial Partners is known for assisting advisors of integrity to better service their clients, run their businesses more profitably, grow faster, and enhance the enterprise value of their firms.  Dynasty does this by providing wealth management and technology platforms for select independent financial advisory firms. Dynasty creates access to valuable resources and industry-leading capabilities through an open architecture platform, enabling advisors to address their clients’ needs and to protect and grow their wealth. Dynasty supports independent advisors and their teams in being independent, but not alone, by creating exclusive community events and experiences. Dynasty also offers access to flexible capital solutions to help advisors expand, scale, and grow their business and provides M&A support to firms looking to grow inorganically or to plan for succession. Dynasty’s core principle is “objectivity without compromise,” and the firm is committed to developing solutions that allow investment advisors to act as true fiduciaries to their clients. ​Dynasty has a leading network of RIAs who leverage its integrated platform and Dynasty’s growing Enterprise Services Group supports larger institutional clients who often have multiple advisors in multiple cities by delivering Dynasty’s platform at the home office and firm-level.  Dynasty has helped to level the playing field for advisors and firms looking to deliver Private Wealth Management capabilities to their UHNW clients vs many of the larger Wall Street firms in providing a robust suite of capabilities, products, and services when combined with Dynasty’s support offers independent advisors the ability to compete at the highest levels of wealth management client opportunities.

Visit National Advisors Trust on social media:

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For more info on Dynasty please visit their website

Visit Dynasty on social media:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Youtube

The Uber of the Trust Industry is Here: Jim Combs Disrupts National Advisors

Scott Martin – The Wealth Advisor Contributor, October 15, 2018

Sometimes the most revolutionary ideas are the simplest ones. For example, what if wealth management actually ran like a business?

It takes a rare independent trust company to hold an affiliate conference at all. When it’s National Advisors Trust the news can turn heads across the industry landscape.

After all, National Advisors used to be a walled garden run for the exclusive benefit of the advisors who paid big bucks to buy in as partners. Back then it would’ve been practically unthinkable for the firm to reach out to anyone else. Insiders knew and liked what was going on. Nobody outside the walled garden really mattered.

That was then. That firm finally decided to embrace the future, and from the energy at the affiliate conference, CEO Jim Combs and his team are only getting started.

Start with the numbers. I’ve occasionally heard other trust companies talk about the industry as a zero sum game, with a relatively fixed number of accounts chasing the sweet spot between price and service.

It’s hard to make a lot of money in that model either way. You just can’t scale fast enough to generate the kind of efficiency that makes growth worthwhile.

Sounds a lot like the advisory business, doesn’t it? But Combs knew National Advisors could do it differently and prosper from that disruptive strategy.

It’s working. There’s actual organic growth here. Referrals have tripled every year since 2016. The average account size has doubled. There’s 200 advisory firms with 57,000 reps on the platform now. In the first quarter of this year alone, they booked more incoming assets than they saw in the entirety of 2014.

That’s not a walled garden for insiders only. That’s an institutional network, a new kind of enterprise with the ability to scale all the way to world domination.

Whether advisors are looking for a trust services partner or not, this is the kind of strategy we can all learn from.

From “practice” to “business”

Combs shares his general thoughts on where the industry is headed HERE. For our purposes, I’d like to tease out a few of the biggest thoughts.

First, the old National Advisors had a world-class service platform because the wealth managers who invested in the network demanded it. Nothing was too good for their clients. However, like a lot of trust operations, it just wasn’t growing fast enough to utilize the platform effectively. Opening up put more of that excess capacity to work and accelerated ROI on every new hire.

The old firm ran like a practice, focused on supporting the right service mix to keep clients (who in this case were also shareholders) happy. If new clients came onboard, the added fee income justified new spending.

Combs transformed that culture into a business. The elite service that client-shareholders demand is still there on the front end, but now it scales a lot bigger.

In theory it scales to the moon. While commodity players in the trust industry have multiplied in the last decade, they’re still just chasing slivers of a deeply fragmented market. Figure 80% of all trust assets are still in the hands of individual trustees and only 15-20% of advisors are actively working with trusts, and the right business model can roll up a lot of accounts without hitting any walls.

National Advisors has aggressive marketing plans. They’ve rebranded and are in the early stages of getting the word out that they’re a new kind of trust company, friendly to Millennials and happy to stay out of referring advisors’ way.

It reminds me of the early days of an innovator like Uber. On the outside, it looks like a conventional cab company until you start listing the differentiating factors.

Uber doesn’t actually hire drivers or operate a fleet. National Advisors has zero interest in making the portfolio investment calls. That’s for the advisors to do. And Uber is actually about the app, not the mileage. It’s a technology company. National Advisors is rapidly becoming more than a commodity trust organization.

Not a practice: a culture

DNA is an important concept in the new National Advisors. It’s a scientific framework for talking about how things grow from sometimes humble origins, what separates species and people from each other. You actually can’t spell “differentiator” without DNA. Everything here starts from the roots, the platform that some of the country’s most visionary advisors teamed up to build. 

Now it’s flowering and changing the industry landscape in the process. Like Uber or the robo advisors, it might create entire new categories to replace the ones it disrupts. We used a lot of Silicon Valley language at that conference. “Category killer.” The power of a “blue ocean” business model to support endless cooperative growth that a traditional “red ocean” keeps boiling down to eat-or-be-eaten survival tactics.

National Advisors has no interest in that kind of zero-sum game. As long as it can help advisors thrive, it thrives. Trust-linked accounts are incredibly sticky by conventional standards — the people at the conference had a lot of insight into that — and resist brute automation nicely. After all, that front end of the trust business is all about human contact, anticipating the beneficiaries and interpreting the grantors. It’s about being able to deal with exotic assets without swallowing too much fiduciary risk. It’s about customization, which normally scales linearly with human resources. You bring in X new accounts and need Y new people to deal with them.

Combs talks about “customization at scale.” That means applying the front end as effectively as possible to make more money as you grow. Advisors and clients get the human touch. The firm can move from the niches our industry loves to powerhouse status.

And it’s the kind of thing every advisor looking over his or her shoulder at the robots can emulate. Use your human resources efficiently. Do what only humans can do.

That’s work with clients and prospects. After all, there are a lot of them out there once we leave the walled garden of legacy advisory practice behind. You can probably find a partner to do everything else.

We’ll be watching the model with great interest. For now, you can check out Combs’ thoughts HERE. 

National Advisors Named to The Wealth Advisor America’s Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies 2019

KANSAS CITY, MO, February 25, 2018 – National Advisors Trust Company, an independent national trust company providing expert services and solutions to trusted advisors and the families they serve, announces that it has been named to The Wealth Advisor’s 2019 America’s Most Advisor-Friendly Trust Companies. The 8th edition of the annual report ranks National Advisors Trust 5th out of 23 companies in total assets under administration.

The annual report is a compulsory read for financial advisors seeking to expand their knowledge of the trust landscape and fuel growth by offering trust solutions. In this year’s report, The Wealth Advisor surveyed 500 financial advisors and asked, “What makes a trust company friendly?” The results revealed the most critical factor was assurance that accounts won’t be taken (85 percent), closely followed by reputation and length of time in business (80 percent).

The Wealth Advisor Editor-in-Chief Scott Martin writes, “The companies we talked to in compiling this year’s guide had a great year. Some saw their AUA surge anywhere from 10 percent to 25 percent, and nationally chartered National Advisors Trust booked more accounts in the first quarter than it did in the entirety of 2014.”

“We’re honored to be recognized once again in this leading publication. Being advisor-friendly isn’t a tag line for National Advisors; it’s the core reason we chartered the firm almost two decades ago. That commitment has never wavered,” said National Advisors Trust Company CEO Jim Combs. “We look forward to another banner year of helping trusted advisors grow their business, achieve their clients’ goals, and retain next-generation wealth transfers with our directed trust solutions.”

More Excerpts from the Report:

  • “Trust services create the kind of deeper, value-added relationship that provides the long-term structure that keeps clients from drifting away. Assets held in trust can remain in place in perpetuity, accumulating wealth across multiple generations of clients and keeping the fees flowing for decades.”
  • “A full 82% of our readers say finding a trust company they can recommend to their best clients has translated into new relationships, enhanced account retention or both. That’s it. It’s a pure business decision and the numbers speak for themselves.”
  • “Over the next 30-35 years, [Baby Boomers’] heirs are on track to inherit roughly $3 billion a day or over $1 trillion annually. And as those assets transfer, the kids are rarely prepared to handle the responsibilities.”

Click here to read more about National Advisors from the report. To read the full report, click here. For more information on National Advisor Trust Company’s advisor-friendly trust and custody solutions, contact us at 877-527-3476 or email info@nationaladvisorstrust.com.

About National Advisors
National Advisors is a family of companies providing expert nationwide trust, custody and concierge services to trusted advisors and the families they serve. National Advisors is comprised of the following entities: National Advisors Trust Company; National Advisors Trust of South Dakota, Inc.; National Advisors Concierge Services; and National Advisors Holdings, Inc. Enriching Lifelong Relationships unites and unifies the professional staff of National Advisors. We embrace our clients with this common purpose, delivering a seamless, consistent experience across our family of companies. For additional information please visit www.nationaladvisorstrust.com.

Calamos Wealth Management Forms Calamos Private Trust to Provide Suite of Trust Solutions

Naperville, IL, July 17, 2018 Calamos Wealth Management, a full-service wealth advisory firm serving individuals and families, announced today the formation and launch of Calamos Private Trust which is set to offer a comprehensive suite of trust services to clients in all 50 states.

Calamos Private Trust is a Trust Representative Office of National Advisors Trust Company (NATC), an independent trust company with a national charter. Calamos Private Trust delivers a full range of trust
and trustee services in partnership with NATC, with administrative trust services provided by NATC.

“Adding trust services brings additional breadth to our already comprehensive approach to investment management and wealth advisory services,” said Jim Baka, President of Calamos Wealth Management. “Trusts are a regular feature in the highly customized solutions we plan and implement for our clients. By offering trust administration services through Calamos Private Trust, we can provide our clients with greater ease and convenience in carrying out their estate plans and in solutions to other financial needs.”

Trust and trustee services are provided under a directed trust model—an approach that emphasizes a team of experts working in conjunction to serve a trust’s beneficiaries. Each expert serves as a fiduciary, specializing in a particular area such as investment management. This emphasis on fiduciary specialization sets apart the directed trust model from bundled trust services traditionally offered by bank trust departments.

Baka said, “Under the directed trust model, our wealth advisors are able to serve as investment managers of trust assets if requested to do so by clients. In this way, we can combine investment and trust services in a more effective way as we serve families over multiple generations.”

About Calamos Wealth Management:
Calamos Wealth Management LLC provides comprehensive investment and wealth advisory services to individuals, families, and small to mid-size institutions including foundations and charitable endowments. Services include investment advisory, comprehensive wealth planning, risk management, and generational wealth transfer, among others needed to meet the needs of its diverse clientele. Calamos Wealth Management headquarters are located in Naperville, Illinois with additional offices in New York and Florida. The firm is a wholly owned subsidiary of Calamos Investments LLC.

To learn more about Calamos Private Trust visit:
www.calamos.com/wm/CalamosPrivateTrust

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