An enjoyable digital experience is also going to be important to the client, he says, as are advisors’ ability to keep on top of complex estate planning and taxation problems for the clients.
Two currently important trust vehicles for the wealthy are grantor trust and spousal trust, which are the most common ways of increasing wealth transfer at high-net-worth practices, according to Cerulli.
“Grantor trusts in general have been a pretty popular medium for wealth transfer and tax minimization particularly over the last five to 10 years,” Horton said. “But spousal lifetime access trusts have been increasingly popular this year and last year. The tactic around that is … what spousal lifetime access trust do is allow clients to lock in the existing estate tax exemption as it’s set to sunset in the next couple of years.”