Planners Who Switched, and Why

Roy Diliberto, president of RTD Financial Advisors in Philadelphia, is also shifting clients’ assets from Schwab to Waterhouse because he prefers Waterhouse’s arms-length relationship with vendors like Advent and Capital Trust Company of Delaware. Diliberto “keeps looking” at SEI Investments as well, specifically because it specializes in reporting and back-office work, tasks his firm now has to perform in-house. But he expects to handle some of those reporting chores once Waterhouse completes adding Advent’s service offerings to its VEO platform.

Moving some assets to National Advisors Trust Company (NATCO) was one of the best ways for John Ueleke, president of Legacy Wealth Management in Memphis, Tennessee, to protect his firm’s independence. “It’s important to have more than one custodian because we’re never sure who our friends are,” he says. Ueleke also houses client assets at Schwab, but found it increasingly hard to get trust services handled for clients with $1 million or less through U.S. Trust.

NATCO offers cheaper prices as well. At NATCO, “a trust account is about 25 basis points for them to serve as trustee,” Ueleke says, “and that’s under the assumption that we are then serving as the investment advisor to the account and doing the investing, so [NATCO is] not accepting that responsibility for that price level.” The 25 bps charge is about half of what U.S. Trust would charge for the same service, he says.