With over $100 million in assets under management, The Planning Center optimizes their back office operations with Trust’s high efficiency trading and personalized service
DENVER (December 8, 2009) – Trust Company of America, a specialized provider of asset custody and technology services to fee-based Registered Investment Advisors, today announced that The Planning Center has selected Trust as its primary asset custodian.
Founded in 1998, The Planning Center is an independent, fee-only financial planning firm with more than $100 million in assets under management. Over the last few years, as The Planning Center’s proprietary approach to financial planning and wealth management fueled its remarkable growth, the firm’s leadership knew it would have to implement best-in-business technology solutions and practice efficiencies to enable continued success. In Trust, The Planning Center saw an attentive partner with a custody platform and back office services capable of optimizing the firm’s operations. The Planning Center is aggressively transferring its assets to the Trust custody platform, and the conversion is expected to be completed by the end of 2009.
Driven by a need for fast and effective trading and rebalancing, The Planning Center has realized significant value from Trust’s model portfolio technology. The Trust platform enables them to define their investment strategies directly on the custody platform and then easily apply one or more strategies to each client account. The real benefit comes when they need to invest new money, free up cash for systematic distributions, or rebalance accounts. Instead of day-long trading processes involving data upload and manual calculations, now The Planning Center only needs to “click and trade.”
“We’re thrilled to have The Planning Center join our rapidly growing client roster of highly successful advisors,” said Terry Reitan, president and CEO of Trust. “Exceptional advisory firms like The Planning Center know that efficient technology really can make a difference in a firm’s success, and it is great to see them utilize our powerful platform to its fullest.”
“Not only have we benefited from technology that makes our firm more efficient, we’ve appreciated Trust’s commitment to our continued success, said Marty Kurtz, founder/president of The Planning Center. “The level of service we’ve received in planning our transfer to Trust Company and the daily service we’ve received in managing each of the transfers has been exceptional.”
The Planning Center’s conversion is progressing rapidly and smoothly, with the assistance of a dedicated relationship manager. This relationship manager is also assisting with internal cross-training to remove any single points of failure in their firm. Additionally, The Planning Center has already experienced Trust’s flexibility and desire to continuously enhance its platform based on client feedback. While setting up modeled portfolios, for example, The Planning Center wished to accommodate a greater amount of market float than the system allowed. This month the investment deviations settings are being expanded.
In addition to high-efficiency trading and receiving extraordinary service, The Planning Center also now has the ability to streamline account opening processes, automate management fee processing, and rely on a single relationship for both their general investment accounts and their managed 401(k) accounts.
By providing advisors with advanced technology solutions and personalized support, Trust helps position advisors for success.
