Technology providers are leading an evolution in
North American trust companies, as businesses strive to hang on to their
declining market share in the fast-growing wealth management industry.
The trust business has not changed greatly over the
last century, resisting the rapid growth that has occurred in the wealth
management industry over the past twenty years. For the trust industry in
North America today, the choice is simple: change or decline into
irrelevance. In a new report, Trust Companies: Firms, Products,
Clients, and Technologies, Celent discusses how businesses can
transition towards a new and more relevant business model. These players
will differ notably from their predecessors in that they will feature open
architecture for products, straight-through processing of transactions,
more efficient account administration, better and more client-focused
usage of investment officers, and online access and management direction
from clients.
“The trust industry has shown itself to be a poor
adapter to the new realities of the wealth management industry, having
declined from the prevalent form of wealth management just fifty years ago
to a much smaller market share today,” according to Robert
J. Ellis, senior analyst with Celent and author of the report. “Fortunately,
new realities and technologies are leading the trust industry to adopt
different business models, such as open architecture for products, that
will allow the trust industry to better compete in the future.”
This report examines the firms providing trust
services and assesses the clients for trust companies’ offerings. The
report also reviews both current and planned trust technology offerings
from Metavante, Northern Trust, SEI, SunGard, AccuTech,
HWA International, and Innovest. Trust systems receive
highly detailed evaluations and are then compared utilizing Celent’s
ABCD Vendor View. This analysis shows at a glance the relative position of
vendors based on Advanced Technology, Breadth of Functionality, Customer
Base (number of paying clients), and Depth of Client Services. The report
also briefly discusses international trust companies as competition for
North American providers and makes projections for the future of the trust
industry in North America.
The report is 58 pages and contains 22 figures and
six tables. Many of the figures are screen shots of different existing and
developing trust systems. These screen shots are selected to highlight
user dashboards, transaction processing screens, and client web access
views.
The report’s table of
contents is available online.
