Building stronger client relationships was the main impetus behind the creation of AMG Guaranty Trust in Denver, when it was formed through a merger of Asset Management Group and the trust department of Guaranty Bank and Trust in 2001.

Earl Wright, one of the founders of AMG and president and CEO of AMG Guaranty Trust, says AMG decided 10 years ago that it needed to respond to clients demands for trust services. "Our clients were asking us to be trustees and we couldn't be," he says. In addition, the firm was losing accounts of $5 million and larger to trust companies, particularly upon the death of longtime clients. "We felt it was kind of a foolish business model to end up having the clients we had been quite successful with ending up transitioning their assets away from us," Wright adds.

So it was in 1996 that AMG began a serious study of its options, hiring attorney Sheryl Bollinger to come up with the best way for the company to adopt trust services. That included considering everything from offering partial trust services through a third party to completely transforming the firm into a trust company.

One of the first decisions they made was to seek a federal charter under the jurisdiction of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), primarily because AMG already had offices in four different states. The main goal was to put the company in a position where it could act as a corporate trustee for its high net worth clients, Bollinger says.

Another question to deal with was whether to roll everything up into one company, or retain the SEC-regulated RIA end of the business and set up a sister company or a subsidiary. That question, however, was answered almost from the beginning by the guidelines AMG set up for the changes.

"We believed in keeping it simple," Wright says. "We wanted to know, 'What is the simplest way could do this and make sure we don't have a lot of regulatory agencies to deal with.'"

That set the firm on a course to be one entity regulated by the OCC. What ended up helping is that AMG was already in compliance with many of OCC's operational and reporting rules, Wright says. "We've held ourselves to fiduciary standards since we organized in 1974," he says.

Perhaps the key turning point in the firm's transition came in 1999, when firm officials thought they had decided to undergo a soup-to-nuts application process that would have resulted in the formation of a new trust company. That plan changed, however, after the firm consulted with a local bank and decided on merging with its trust division.

The plan called for the trust division to merge with AMG, under AMG management, with the bank receiving shares in the new company equal to 16% of ownership, according to Wright. For AMG, it provided a streamlined way to transition into a trust company. The bank, meanwhile, got an ownership interest and a source for comprehensive wealth management for its high-end clients.

The merger also allowed the new trust company to offer a broader variety of services than it otherwise would have, including services for special needs and corporate trusts, says Bollinger. "If there was no merger opportunity, we probably would have started with much more limited trustee services," she says.

Now, three years after the merger was completed, Wright says that 90% of the trust company's clients said in a recent survey that they would refer people to the business. "We are driven by what we think our clients' needs are," he says.