Wealth ManagementThe true opportunity of integrated wealth management
By Elizabeth Urish, Founding Partner and Managing Director
Making integration meaningful for clients
Everywhere I turn these days, I see ads promising clients an integrated approach to wealth management. But in my work with families and business owners, I’ve found that clients may underestimate the true complexity of their financial ecosystem, from the opportunities to the risks. That’s why we go beyond service offerings that are integrated in name only to provide greater impact: Investment, tax, estate, and philanthropic experts who take the time to understand you and your entire wealth picture, thinking and strategizing as a unified team to help you achieve multifacted goals over the long term.
Let’s define the basics
At a minimum, integrated wealth management should offer a clear governance structure and regular communication that makes your experience easier. These elements help prevent clients from missing opportunities, like creating trusts that never get properly funded, or even experiencing harms, such as when investment accounts at multiple institutions lack a single point of oversight and end up with overconcentration of risk.
Preventing these scenarios requires a thoughtful structure and communication plan that keeps your tax, legal, investment, and philanthropic advisors fully informed of each other’s strategies and actions—all unified under one set of goals created between you and your financial advisor.
As a wealth management client, you should always know how your team is sharing information and coordinating their actions, with your financial advisor as the team’s “captain” (more on that in a future article), to meet your goals. These are the fundamentals of integrated planning.
“Clients need more than just efficiency. They need a team that helps them solve more than one important objective at the same time, prioritize objectives, manage implications, and ultimately weave together a plan that produces an ambitious set of outcomes.
Elizabeth Urish, Founding Partner and Managing Director, Steel Tower Investments
Complexity demands more than coordination
Stopping there, with just improved communication and structure, may meet your needs. But many of my clients are navigating situations with deep complexity. They may own a business or a series of ventures facing expansion opportunities, potential headwinds, and intricate succession plans. Their multiple real estate properties may be in states with varying tax laws. And many have a wide range of interests shaping their legacy, from children and grandkids to alma maters to charitable causes close to their hearts.
These clients need more than just efficiency. They need a team that helps them solve more than one important objective at the same time, prioritize objectives, manage implications, and ultimately weave together a plan that produces an ambitious set of outcomes.
The true opportunity: deeper solutions
Complex financial decisions rarely have one right answer; they often have several good ones. A CPA naturally sees a decision through the lens of taxes. An estate attorney sees it through wealth transfer and asset protection. An investment advisor sees portfolio construction.
Each perspective is valuable on its own, but none tells the full story of the family’s experiences and goals. Financially complex families are usually trying to accomplish several important, sometimes competing, objectives at once. They might want to minimize taxes while preserving flexibility, or to pursue growth while maintaining liquidity, or to strengthen asset protection without adding unnecessary intricacies.
The true differentiator of an integrated wealth planning team isn’t that its specialists talk to one another, though of course they should. It’s that they think together—planning with the understanding that a family’s goals will sometimes pull in different directions. This kind of team engages in deep and frequent planning sessions about the family’s goals, bringing insights from their varying disciplines. As a result, they’re able to provide sophisticated strategies that address multiple important outcomes and continue to evolve as priorities change.
Putting integration into practice
In my experience, investment decisions are often the least challenging part of wealth management. The harder, more valuable work is spending time with each family to uncover the goals, desires, and motivations that shape their thinking—and helping them articulate what they’d like to accomplish. Before we discuss strategies or solutions, we spend considerable time simply asking questions: What does success look like for the family? What flexibility do they want to protect? What worries them most? What legacy are they hoping to build?
Many families have never been asked to put those priorities into words, yet the answers are crucial. Only by taking the time to get to know a family and map out their intersecting goals, even as they change, can we be sure we are working toward the right set of outcomes.
Once a family’s goals are on the table, our specialists explore strategies and pressure-test each recommendation against the family’s broader picture, not just against their own discipline. That requires the team to continuously step back and ask whether the best answer for one area of expertise is also the best answer for the family as a whole.
The point isn’t to independently optimize taxes, or investments, or estate planning outcomes, but rather to build a plan in which each decision reinforces the others. Equally important is walking the family through the implications of these decisions so they can move forward with confidence.
Decisions that stand the test of time
Families don’t come to us looking for more expertise. They’re looking for better decisions. They want to look back years from now and feel confident that each choice was grounded in the priorities that mattered most to them. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to at Steel Tower Investments. True integrated wealth management, as I would define it, isn’t a matter of assembling the right specialists in the right room. It’s the process of bringing together the best minds in the most consultative process to ensure your wealth plan stands the test of time.
To learn more about our integrated planning process can help you, contact us.
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURES
The information included in this document is for general, informational purposes only. It does not contain any investment advice and does not address any individual facts and circumstances. As such, it cannot be relied on as providing any investment advice. If you would like investment advice regarding your specific facts and circumstances, please contact a qualified financial advisor.
Any investment involves some degree of risk, and different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, including loss of principal. It should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment, strategy or allocation (including those recommended by Steel Tower Investments) will be profitable or equal the corresponding indicated or intended results or performance level(s). Past performance of any security, indices, strategy or allocation may not be indicative of future results.
The historical and current information as to rules, laws, guidelines or benefits contained in this document is a summary of information obtained from or prepared by other sources. It has not been independently verified, but was obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Steel Tower Investments does not guarantee the accuracy of this information and does not assume liability for any errors in information obtained from or prepared by these other sources.
Steel Tower Investments is not a legal or accounting firm, and does not render legal, accounting or tax advice. You should contact an attorney or CPA if you wish to receive legal, accounting or tax advice.
Investment advisory services are offered through UP Strategic Wealth Investment Advisors, LLC, doing business as Steel Tower Investments. NOT FDIC INSURED – NOT BANK GUARANTEED – MAY LOSE VALUE, INCLUDING LOSS OF PRINCIPAL – NOT INSURED BY ANY STATE OR FEDERAL AGENCY
