The story is familiar: A client with $500,000 in net worth sets up a trust for his spouse and kids, hoping to pass on his legacy. He names a local community bank as trustee, probably because he plays golf with the trust officer. Next thing you know, the bank is swallowed up in a merger, maybe not once but two or three times.

The golf buddy is long gone, the corporate trustee bank is a ghost, and a giant bank takes over when mom dies. There the money sits, held captive. Irrevocable, maybe. But untouchable to an RIA? Don't be so sure.

Beneficiaries such as the kids in these situations often find their trust assets invested in long bonds or individual stocks, not growing, or worse yet, declining. There isn't much staff to service smaller accounts, just a call center with a 1-800 number (unless you've got a large account of $2 million or so). The bank's investment products are often proprietary, the fees high, the performance poor. The relationship management non-existent. Because the staff is on salary, there's no incentive for them to outperform or even make calls after 5 p.m. These are the common complaints of bank trust customers, according to a study by Tiburon Strategic Advisors.

But this prevailing model has been slowly changing, and since the early 1990s, banks' share of trust assets has dwindled to about 40% of the personal trust market, according to Tiburon. Coming in to fill the gap are broker-dealers, lawyers and independent trust companies. And in the new arrangements, RIAs can seize the day and take over not only assets but pride of place in the trust relationship.

These trends have only been amplified by the financial crisis, since many people are now more willing to cut their ties with the country's venerable financial institutions-especially if they've been watching their trust assets lose sap. They might have seen their RIA make money for them in their retirement accounts, and that might make them itchier to move the trusts to the RIA as well.

Dave Ness, president of Raymond James Trust, says his company has seen a dramatic increase in trust assets; about $300 million in assets under administration flew into the door in fiscal 2010, and the company has already beat that since fiscal 2011 started in October. He says 40% of new assets are usually takeaway accounts from other institutions, but that number has grown to more than half recently.

"What happened during the financial crisis is that mix changed a little bit-markets go up, people get sick and die anyway, so that part of the business didn't change," says Ness. "What changed was people's willingness to make gifts, and also the turmoil led to more people wanting to move their trust."

Trust management has also been affected by the flip-flops and reversals in tax law. The temporarily expunged estate tax was supposed to come back Lazarus-like in 2011, but President Obama and Congress in December agreed to beat it back for another two years. At the same time, they offered chance-of-a-lifetime, gargantuan $5 million lifetime gift tax exemptions ($10 million for couples) that have people tearing up their estate plans and salivating at the idea of passing massive wealth on to heirs tax-free. This should also create many opportunities for trust creation and movement, say advisors and consultants.

"This is only for these two years," says Vincent Barbera, a CFP licensee with TGS Financial Advisors in Radnor, Pa., of the lifetime gift-tax exemption, "so we take advantage of all this gifting, sort of eat that $5 million while it's available. If [clients] die in three years, there's no guarantee what that estate tax will be."

If those items weren't convincing enough to make an RIA consider taking on more trust business, he can simply look at the demographics: As baby boomers age, they will seek more ways to divide, shelter and pass along their assets, controlling their children's financial futures from the grave if they can, staggering payouts or throwing their money to a charity. And unlike the Greatest Generation, they aren't wedded to banks.

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