Austin Braithwait joined UMB in 2012 and has overseen the corporate trust and agency services business since 2015. Here, he reflects on its remarkable growth and current strategic positioning.
Is there a driving force behind your work?
Earlier in my career, before coming to UMB, I was with an institution that had to be wound down at the time of the Great Recession. Shutting something down is really tough. What drives me personally is wanting to build something enduring, that keeps people coming to work over the long term.
What’s the history of corporate trust?
When I took responsibility for corporate trust in 2015, the business was nearly 70 years old. We were clearly committed to corporate trust, but it was a more narrowly defined business focused on municipal trustee and paying agent business as well as some escrow and some corporate deals.
What changed in 2014?
We made a strategic decision to grow the business because it would add fee income to UMB’s bottom line as well as bring in deposits the bank could loan to our commercial and consumer clients.
How has that played out?
We’ve proven out both objectives very strongly. Corporate trust is now one of the biggest fee contributors within UMB, and we’ve been able to attract significant cash balances that help our partners in commercial and consumer as stable deposits from which they can lend to our client base.
Our plan was for double-digit annual revenue growth. We’ve done that consistently—and are continuing to do it.
Does corporate trust remain a strategic priority for UMB?
Yes—at the very highest levels. Every year, we present the UMB board with an update on our progress. The board focuses closely on our ability to generate fees and raw materials (deposits).
This level of strategic importance separates us from our competitors. At the largest banks, the corporate trust function amounts to a rounding error—even though just a few large banks have consolidated much of the nationwide corporate trust industry. Those banks ran out of runway, and their priorities shifted.
We, on the other hand, can continue to gain market share for many years to come as we focus on providing client service.
What’s behind UMB taking market share?
The service model. Our major competitors have tried to create specializations that may look like efficiencies—but then nobody understands the entirety of the transactions they are administering.
Our model is different. Our administrators and operations teams are linked, and they are structured to understand the client—not just the specific trust or agency transaction but the overall relationship and how to add value across UMB Institutional Banking. We have brought the best talent in the industry to UMB; they care about our clients and the work they do. We work hard to provide an environment where our teams can do their best work to support our clients.
What do clients say about the model?
Many have come from large providers and tell us everything was much more complex, much more bifurcated where they came from. They’re almost shocked at how easy it can be to deal with UMB.
This comes back to corporate trust mattering to UMB. But it’s also the model. We have many clients we serve across corporate trust, fund services and institutional custody. We have a shared operations team that understands clients holistically.
That’s fundamentally different from our competitors who have outsourced functions, such as to operations centers overseas. That has not been our focus.
What is the holistic model like for employees?
If you want mundane, repetitive tasks, we’re not the place to come to work. That’s true across all our products, and our relationship managers tend to appreciate that.
Many relationship managers have come to us from the largest players in the industry. They stay—we have essentially very minimal turnover. People stay until they retire. As we have grown, the added volumes have added stress, and we continue to focus on building on generating systemic efficiencies without compromising our personal touch.
What’s the range of UMB’s corporate trust and agency services?
We now cover all major areas. We’ve gotten there through a mix of organic growth, lift-outs and acquisitions.
For example, back in 2015, we lifted out a team in Texas, where we’d previously had no presence. In 2018, we acquired a funeral trust business. Later that year we brought on our first four hires in the aviation trustee segment of the asset-backed securities (ABS) segment. In 2019, we opened a New York office and acquired Bankers Trust’s corporate trust book of business in Iowa —both part of our growth serving corporate deals.
Then in 2020, we acquired Commerce Bank’s corporate trust business. We also made a New York hire that expanded our reach into Latin America where we are performing a growing number of cross-border transactions. In 2021, we expanded our aviation business (which had grown tremendously since those first hires) with an office in Dublin, Ireland. Also in 2021, we got into the Loan agency business—with a loan-agency-specific technology system in partnership with our commercial team that leverages the same platform—so we can work on the loan side in addition to the bond side of deals.
In 2022, we opened a Delaware trust office. And in 2023, we started building out our collateralized loan obligation (CLO) team—the last major area we hadn’t yet covered.
In every area, we’ve always entered with a best-in-breed commitment. We have some of the industry’s most respected talent. And we’ve invested in these businesses and will continue to invest.
What’s next?
Now that we have all the major corporate trust product lines, our focus is tuning our workflows and systems, both within and across the groups that make up corporate trust and agency services.
We’re cognizant that as we grow, we don’t want to lose our identity. We talk all the time about how we’re getting this business partly due to the failure of our competitors to focus on service. We want to continue doing it right.
Become more efficient, yes—but not by specializing in tasks to the point our team members don’t understand the entirety of the transaction that they administer. We promise our clients a single point of contact that understands them holistically, not just a specific job on an assembly line. We think that it benefits our clients and is more fulfilling for our team members in corporate trust.
UMB is a nationally recognized and ranked provider of bond trustee and agency services to the corporate and municipal marketplaces. Visit umb.com to learn about our corporate trust services and how we can support your organization’s trust and escrow needs, or contact us to be connected with a corporate trust team member.
