Tuesday, June 15, 2010

An acute challenge for the Merrill Anderson Company

The Wall Street Journal reports on the growing competition between states to be home to trusts for wealthy families. States have limited or eliminated the rule against perpetuities, and they have reduced taxation of trusts of nonresidents. Most important, the efforts have succeeded:

Between 1985 and 2003, some $100 billion—about 10% of reported trust assets held by federally regulated financial institutions—moved to states that allowed long-term trusts and didn't tax trusts created by nonresidents, according to a study by Robert Sitkoff, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Max Schanzenbach, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, published in the Yale Law Journal.

Most of Merrill Anderson's trust marketing material is intended for multi-state distribution, and has no state-specific observations.  Much of the material is sold into states that haven't entered the competition. Apart from emphasizing the value of local administration, how can we respond productively to this development?

1 comment:

JLM said...

You meant "acute opportunity," of course. Trust companies promoting their dynastic and asset-protection capabilities are willing and able to pay extra for promotional materials tailored to their markets.

Although they may be attracting 10 percent of new trust assets, my guess is that these institutions are getting less than five percent of trust clients. Dynasty trusts, in particular, tend to be UHNW products.

Took a strictly unscientific, two-stop survey of New Hampshire trust institutions, one large, one small. Both their web sites, presumably targeting the broader HNW market, offered mainly generic marketing messages, usable nationwide.