Trustees Spotlight

The trustee sector as a whole offers a range of services, but each participant firm has its own specialities.

CRAIG Can the trustees provide an overview into their own firms’ offerings, including their main focuses and strengths, and the overall value proposition they offer the market?

SMITH Eticore offers all the standard services expected of a wholesale corporate trustee – corporate and security trust, agency, and trust accounting and management. We also offer some nonstandard services, such as converting client data into the required Reserve Bank of Australia reporting format, analytical modelling and back-up servicing.

Like all the trustees around this table, our main obligation is to provide a fiduciary duty to our clients. But Eticore differentiates itself through what we consider to be an exceptional service mindset and delivery model. Often a service provider will make an approach to a new client with a suite of services they are prepared to offer.

Our approach is to talk with clients to find out the strategic position and direction of their business and thus provide a tailored – rather than a standard – solution for each.

The Eticore team is hand-picked as a group of technically knowledgeable, experienced fiduciary professionals who believe not only in performing our duties but in making it as timely, simple and straightforward as possible for the client.

Another uncommon but highly desirable feature of our business model is that we operate and are available to clients 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

CONNELL Equity Trustees is Australia’s leading specialist trustee – this is what we do. We don’t have a stockbroking division, for example. We’ve been a specialised trustee for 130 years, not just in the private-client space but now also for superannuation, corporate funds, charitable trusts and more.

We launched our responsible entity (RE) business 18 years ago and we’re now the industry-acknowledged leading provider in this space – by a significant margin.

Building on being Australia’s leading independent RE and specialised independent trustee, it was a natural evolution to offer debt-capital-market trustee and loan-agency services from late last year.

We bring a legacy of expertise in trustee services into Australia and it was therefore only natural that we would look to enter this industry at some stage.

We believe the market is now large and sophisticated enough to support a new entrant with expertise and long experience in fiduciary services.

HOWARD Australian Executor Trustees (AET) is part of the IOOF Group (IOOF) – one of the largest nonbank-aligned wealth-management companies. As well as trustee services, IOOF offers financial advice and distribution, platform management, and administration and investment management.

AET is a professional trustee company established in 1880. We pride ourselves on being experienced, commercial and nimble as well as customer-focused. Our service suite is primarily as corporate trustee, security trustee and facility agent for securitisation and debt-capital-markets transactions.

We see our strengths as being our personalised service and our ability to work with the client to achieve their desired outcome. We don’t offer a cookie-cutter approach but a bespoke service tailored appropriately to individual clients’ needs.