Madison Trust Company
Making Control, Versatility Easy for Self-Directed Investors by Carole VanSickle Ellis In 2009, the real estate market was hovering near the bottom of the post-housing-crash slump of the mid-2000s, and Madison Trust Company CEO, president, and co-founder Daniel Gleich was focused on helping his father diversify his retirement investments. In the short-term, this was something of a challenging experience, as one investment manager after another informed Gleich retirement assets were “limited” to stocks and bonds. Gleich, a real estate developer who was well aware of the massive, positive potential in the coming decades’ property markets, was undeterred. The long-term result of his mission to challenge what was, at the time, standard operating procedure for retirement investments, has been life-changing for more than 20,000 of Madison Trust Company’s clients today. “When I heard these financial advisors say, ‘Retirement money is limited to stocks and bonds,’ I just thought to myself, ‘That doesn’t make any sense!’” Gleich recalled. “I understood that we would have to pay taxes on the money if we wanted to move it and diversify, but why couldn’t I invest it where I wanted to?” Soon, he had discovered a relatively unknown vehicle for the time, the self-directed individual retirement account (IRA), and one of its most valuable features, checkbook control. From that point forward, Gleich never looked back. He had found something that would change his father’s retirement investing and that of many, many others over the next 15 years. “It worked beautifully,” Gleich said, “and I was telling friends and neighbors all about self-directed IRAs with checkbook control. After I had set the checkbook control structure up for a few other people, I spoke to one of my partners, Mervyn Klein, future co-founder and shareholder at Madison Trust Company, and we agreed there was a huge opportunity.” They, alongside E. Brian Finkelstein, shareholder and chairman, first opened Broad Financial, an IRA LLC facilitation firm, which worked with a third-party IRA custodian to help investors open checkbook IRAs. By 2012, the founders had realized, as Gleich put it, “the level of customer service that the custodian was offering was not nearly on par with what we were offering.” With an eye toward offering clients a “seamless transaction, all in-house,” the group began the two-year process of meeting with regulators and becoming a trust company. In 2014, the doors of Madison Trust Company opened for the first time. “We wanted to make sure people could invest their retirement money and have more control over those investments,” Gleich said. “There are millions of people out there who could use this investment vehicle and should know about it. At Madison Trust Company, our goal is to help them make that happen.” It was a daunting task, particularly given that around the same time Madison Trust opened for business, the U.S. government actually started work on a report focusing on the dearth of information available on self-directed IRAs and calling for the retirement industry and the IRS to provide more guidance on the topic. That report would be published three years later in 2017. Prioritizing Investor Education & Cutting-Edge Strategy While the federal government began its own research on educational materials available to self-directed investors in the 2010s, Madison Trust Company began a carefully researched educational outreach of its own that would, ultimately, enable the company to grow to the size it remains today. “We spend a lot of time working with our compliance team, consulting the IRS website, and making sure the content team is familiar with all of Madison Trust’s initiatives to ensure that all of our educational material is informative, accurate, and digestible,” observed Brianna Avillo, Madison Trust’s marketing manager. Avillo’s team spearheads content creation for all educational resources on the Madison Trust website, including animated “explainer” videos, infographics, educational webinars, written material, and beyond. “We have an investor-first approach, so our goal is to always make things as easy as possible for our clients,” Avillo said. She explained that for Madison Trust, making things easy for investors means making operations within the organization smooth and pleasant as well. “One of our mottos is that happy employees lead to happy clients,” she said. Gleich elaborated, “If we, as owners, take good care of our employees, and our employees are happy, they will take care of our clients, and our clients will be happy. If our clients have a smooth experience, our shareholders are happy, and the loop continues to go around.” He cited the company’s 900-plus Google reviews with an average star rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars as evidence of the success of this policy and the company’s clients in their self-directed investing endeavors. “If people can successfully self-direct their retirement account, they will have a richer retirement, and Madison Trust aims to provide clients with a pleasant journey getting there,” Gleich said. “The key is providing investors with the opportunity to invest in what they know and believe in.” Dana Udumulla, who serves as investments manager for Madison Trust, said her team relies heavily on the education element provided by the company when she travels on its behalf. “We not only have an education-first approach with our current clients and investors; we are always trying to educate wherever we go,” Udumulla said. “There is a huge retirement crisis looming right now in America, and a lot of people are experiencing anxiety and insecurity when it comes to their finances. By providing education and insight that is simple and straight to the point, we make it possible for anyone to become educated on self-directed IRAs and begin gaining control of their situation.” Walking with Investors Creatively & Constructively Customer care and guidance are crucial elements at Madison Trust Company, Udumulla said, explaining that unlike many other SDIRA custodians in the industry, the Madison Trust investments team has the educational background and training to provide guidance with regard to client inquiries within the self-directed investing space. This means members of the investments team are available to clients
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