Carson Group Taps Trust & Will Capabilities for Advisors

Carson Group and Trust & Will announced a new partnership this week that will allow Carson’s network of advisors to address their clients’ estate plan and probate needs via Trust & Will’s document generation dashboard.

Through this partnership, according to the firms, Carson advisors will be able to address their clients’ estate plan and probate needs efficiently and effectively, with the ability to create ready-to-execute documents in all 50 states.

In a statement announcing the partnership, Jamie Hopkins, managing partner of wealth solutions at Carson Group, says the collaboration will enhance Carson advisors’ range of services and deliver an expanded estate planning offering and better experience for clients.

“We understand that to earn the reputation of being the most reliable source of financial guidance and support, it’s crucial to provide our clients with a modern trust and estate planning solution,” Hopkins adds. “The future of financial planning will include creating a one-stop shop for estate, trust and tax services for clients.”

As detailed in the announcement, the Trust & Will advisor dashboard helps financial planners implement estate planning into their practice and secures sensitive financial information with bank-level encryption and SOC 2 Type II compliance.

“Carson Group has set high standards on how advisors deliver financial planning — we’re thrilled to be partnering with their team,” adds Andres Mazabel, head of advisor sales at Trust & Will. “We look forward to this network joining more than 9,000 advisors who are actively helping families secure their legacy through our platform.”

Responding via email to a list of questions shared by ThinkAdvisor, Carson’s Erin Wood, a senior vice president of financial planning who helped develop the new collaboration, says advisors have been expressing a desire to have a simple trust solution at a reasonable price.

“This desire expanded during the pandemic, so we wanted to find a solution for our advisors where trust solutions could be completed digitally, anywhere, anytime,” she explains. “Trust & Will is a proven solution, used by over half a million families. The streamlined simplicity of their process, the ability to select different packages with different levels of support and their new probate offering made them an easy solution for us to deploy across our nationwide network of advisors.”

According to Wood, legacy planning has evolved over the last few years.

“Previously, it was our older clients that were asking for help,” she notes. “Today it is all generations. Younger clients understand the importance of having their wishes documented and carried out correctly. They have seen friends impacted by the pandemic who didn’t have these documents in place, and they don’t want that to happen to them.”

As ThinkAdvisor has previously reported, experts say estate planning is best understood as a process and not a one-time event, and while wills and trust documents are the most commonly used tools, there are many fundamental documents that a skilled estate planning attorney can help put into place that will result in superior asset protection.

Experts say the main documents in every estate planning effort are the will, the financial power of attorney, the durable power of attorney and the health care directive documentation. Clients with greater means often utilize trusts in the estate planning process, as well.

(Pictured: Jamie Hopkins of Carson Group)