$2B RIA Alvarez & Marsal Launches National Trust Charter
Alvarez & Marsal Private Wealth Partners, the registered investment advisor launched by A&M Inc., the parent company of management consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, about a year and a half ago, has created its own trust company.
Alvarez & Marsal Trust Company, N.A., will be run by Beth King, who was hired in November 2024 to lead the trust company’s buildout. King previously served as president of the Delaware Trust Companies at both Brown Brothers Harriman and J.P. Morgan.
The company’s national bank charter was approved by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Feb. 16. Although the trust company will be headquartered in Delaware, a popular trust jurisdiction, it is a national charter, giving A&M the flexibility to expand into other state jurisdictions, such as Florida and California, in the future without the “drawn-out state chartering process,” King said.
With the launch, A&M Private Wealth Partners, an RIA with about $2 billion in assets under management, will be able to provide fiduciary trust services, including professional trustee and estate settlement services, philanthropic advisory and administration, family business and real estate services, and private trust company services, to its high-net-worth clients.
One differentiator is that A&M Trust will trust assets that are not liquid, including businesses, real estate and other complex assets that other trust companies shy away from, King said.
“Our goal and our vision is to fill the complexity gap that we see in the market,” she said. “There’s a huge opportunity with ultra-high net worth families that have these complex balance sheets: real estate, business interests, you name it. We think there’s a big gap in the market where most other corporate fiduciaries either do not want to take discretion over those assets, or they don’t have the ability to because they can’t execute on it.”
“We feel we can get comfortable with that, and we also have the ability to draw on the actual operational expertise that our partners at A&M have with respect to those underlying assets,” she added.
The RIA is part of A&M Inc., the parent company to A&M Holdings, the global consulting company founded by Tony Alvarez and Bryan Marsal in 1983. The trust company will be able to tap into the operational expertise on the management consulting side of the business, which has various disciplines across geographies and industries, including real estate.
A&M launched the RIA in October 2024, aiming to provide family office services to ultra-high-net-worth families with investable assets exceeding $100 million. It has grown primarily through organic growth, and without private equity backing, said Peter Sacripanti, founding partner and chairman of the RIA.
“Private equity has been in this business acquiring RIAs, and we think that puts enormous pressure on the sales side of the equation,” he said. “Private equity has a certain plan, a certain exit strategy. I have no particular targets about how big we need to be. We’re going to get to the size we will be by taking the right clients and servicing them with the right team.”
This is part of an industry-wide shift by wealth managers to offer additional services, including trust administration.
For instance, in 2021, Moneta, a St. Louis-based RIA, launched its own trust company, Moneta Trust. In 2024, Wealthspire launched its own trust company. Creative Planning has its own trust company, as does Mercer Advisors, via its acquisition of Kanaly Trust in 2016. Hightower launched Hightower National Trust Company in 2022 with a national charter, and CI Financial’s U.S. wealth management business, now known as Corient, launched its own trust company in 2023.