CUSTOMER STORY: HOW TO INCREASE EFFICIENCY AND BUILD A MORE SCALABLE PRACTICE AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTY KURTZ, CEO & FOUNDER, ERIC KIES, PRESIDENT, MATT SIVERTSEN, VICE PRESIDENT AND ANDREW SIVERTSEN, LEAD FINANCIAL PLANNER, OF THE PLANNING CENTER “ Trust Company of America has allowed The Planning Center to ” be more efficient and build a more scalable practice. Marty Kurtz | CEO & Founder, The Planning Center, Inc. How much flexibility does the TCA platform provide you? MARTY KURTZ, CEO & FOUNDER Why do you work with Trust Company of America (TCA)? Marty: Being a financial planning firm, there’s really only two ways we can impact the client: either impact their decisions or impact their behavior. And to have that impact, we need a really strong technology partner. We found that TCA could provide us with the technology we needed to get those decisions for clients made and make sure that their behavioral finance issues were in order. Integrating with TCA and its technology has really been a benefit to our clients. Matt: Before we started using TCA, the custodian we used was not very efficient for modeling trades and required a lot of manual processes that involved a lot of time-intensive activity each day.

TCA provides the technology that makes us more efficient. Eric: The TCA platform enables us to customize our investment models our way. And the platform is built to support the planning experience we want to have with our clients. ERIC KIES, How does TCA PRESIDENT enable you to build a more scalable practice? Eric: We can place trades in 10-15 minutes that would have taken us many days to do if we were trying to place trades one at a time. TCA has enabled us to create and develop a systematic investment experience for all our clients.

The TCA platform has provided us with a massive amount of scale which allows us to focus more on our clients and meeting their needs, rather than spending our time placing trades or doing one-off current-versus-target spreadsheets. (continued on the reverse) . How important is technology to your business? Andrew: For us, technology is a huge game changer. It has basically allowed us to be who we are. And the TCA platform has enabled us to leverage technology in a way that makes us extremely efficient and extremely responsive. Matt: TCA’s technology allows our investment committee to manage our portfolios at the highest level and then trades automatically trickle down to the account level. We were able to stop the time-consuming process of making trades to models on an account-by-account basis.

And TCA gives us the best technology regardless of account size. Back in the day, you had to model a small account in just one fund. With TCA, whether it’s a $5,000 account or a $5 million account, we have the same amount of funds in there, the same amount of rebalancing. Do you have a more profitable practice using this technology? Matt: Absolutely, The Planning Center is much more profitable and efficient with the TCA system of trading. What used to take hours per day on just maybe a handful of client accounts, is now taking a fraction of that time to deal with all of our accounts, many thousands of accounts. MATT SIVERTSEN, VICE PRESIDENT How has the TCA platform helped your business? Matt: The TCA platform has been easy to use.

It enables our investment committee full reign to structure portfolios the way we want. The technology is very easy to use so that we know exactly what we’re doing across thousands of accounts. We also feel like TCA has a great pricing model.

We need a pricing model that isn’t trade-sensitive to where every individual trade costs something. How important are the mobile features of Liberty to your business? ANDREW SIVERTSEN, LEAD FINANCIAL PLANNER Andrew: It’s extremely empowering because we live in a virtual, mobile world. I can be away from the office at a conference or in an airport, and I can manage my clients’ accounts on an iPad. What would you say to other advisors about TCA? Andrew: Trust Company of America has allowed us to provide investment management in a very efficient manner. It gives us the time back in our day to spend on doing what we think is most important – which is sitting next to our clients, walking them through life transitions and really helping make a difference in their lives. Marty: TCA’s platform gives us a lot more control.

We can closely articulate to our clients where they are today and what we think needs to be done for their futures. The definition of chaos isn’t “we don’t know where we’re going.” The definition of chaos is “we don’t know where we are right now.” TCA has allowed us to really limit our chaotic moments because we really do understand where we are right now and what we need to do to protect our clients’ money in the future. At TCA, we improve your efficiencies and empower you to achieve higher levels of success. Discover how we can help transform your business.

Contact us today at 1-800-955-7808 or visit trustamerica.com Since 1972, Trust Company of America (TCA) has been a champion of Registered Investment Advisors, dedicated to helping them realize their full potential. TCA is the only independent RIA custodian offering fully integrated real-time technology, consultative services and back office support built exclusively for RIAs. © 2016 Trust Company of America. All Rights Reserved. Member FDIC.

Investment Products: Not FDIC Insured - No Bank Guarantee – May Lose Value. . .