For many high-net-worth individuals, finding the right private banking partner who will work with you and your family office team to identify the strategies and services that will enhance your current strategies can help accelerate the achievement of goals.

Regardless of where your financial goals are focused, strategic borrowing and thoughtful use of credit can increase the strength of your wealth. When combined with the power of a family office, the strategies used to grow and protect your wealth are multiplied, making your goals can be more achievable.

But what exactly is private banking? What are the products they typically offer that will enhance your current strategies? How do those products and services work in tandem with the family office to complement each other? And how do you find the right private banking partner?

Kami Elhert leads this live discussion between Trish Teague, Senior Vice President with Cogent Private Banking, and Brian Shey, Family Office Strategist, during which they will discuss how private banking and your family office complement each other to move your financial goals forward, including:

  • What private banking is
  • The advantages of using a smaller bank
  • How private banking can be used to help you achieve your goals
  • How private banking works with and complements your family office

 

Transcript (edited for clarity)

Kami Elhert: Hello. Thank you all for joining the webinar today, Private Banking: Moving Your Financial Goals Forward. During the webinar, we will discuss what private banking is, the advantages of using a smaller bank, how private banking can be used to help you achieve your goals, and how private banking works with and complements your family office. I’m Kami Elhert, senior client relationship manager. And today I’m joined by Trish Teague, senior vice-president with Cogent Private Baking. Good morning, Trish.

Trish Teague: Hello, Kami. How are you?

Elhert: I’m well. Thank you so much for joining us.

Teague: Thank you for inviting me.

Elhert: We also have Brian Shey, family office strategist. Hello, Brian.

Brian Shey: Hello, Kami and Trish. And hello to everyone out there that is coming to view our webinar today. Happy Friday.

Elhert: Trish, since we are talking about private baking, can you tell us a little bit about what private banking exactly is?

Teague: Sure, Kami. When we think about private banking, our delivery channel and our motto is we want to deliver an exceptional financial experience to our clients. We like to be innovative in our delivery, nimble in our thinking, and structure our credit facilities so each unique situation gets clear and concise products that match what they want to do versus being an in-the-box approach. We want to be like Cheers here. We want everyone to know your name when you walk into our office. And we do our best to make sure that our clients feel like our family.

Brian, when you collaborate with private bankers in your family office, I do believe that it gives you a real ability to manage the relationship and make sure that everything’s titled properly, that the credit facilities complement your investment strategy. And it really gives a great custom plan that supports the clients’ needs, goals and aspirations, don’t you think?

Shey: Yes, Trish, without a doubt. I like the Cheers analogy. So I’m waiting for a cold beer to be slid to me by Woody. But when you think about private banking, everything that I do as a family office strategist with TSP Family Office is to try to tie our professionals back into the family office. And Cheers is a good example. It’s an intimate relationship that we have with all of our clients throughout the country. We know financially more about each one of our clients than probably any other particular professional that they might be working with, if we’re not doing it all inside. And from a banking standpoint, it’s no different in that it is intimate. It’s a personal relationship. It’s not a 1-800, stand-in line, make a phone call. It’s contact your banker, call you on your cell phone, and get something done. So it’s a good analogy.

Teague: Right. And it’s so important that we work together because when you look at all the planning that you put into a relationship, and then if the planning documents aren’t executed properly – in the banking world, for example, making sure that the accounts are titled in the trust or titled with a POD or whatever it is that’s specific and unique to that individual – then all the planning is just wasted because when the event happens that the planning’s purpose is for, there’s no execution. That’s one of the most important reasons why working with the family office, working with your CPA, and working with your banker is such an important thing to do as you accumulate wealth.

Shey: That makes me think about all of the items out there or the life-altering changes that our clients go through. We work with almost 400 different relationships throughout the country that are high level – some entrepreneurs, many of them are physicians – but they are all what I call type A personalities. They all view themselves as having a bigger future than they currently have now. They’re all looking to grow their net worth or expand. Just about any of that requires money and either they’re going to use their own money, they’re going to use their investment accounts, or they’re going to go talk to the banker, whether it be weddings, paying for college, expanding their practices, buying buildings, buying into new practices. These are conversations that occur with Kami as the relationship manager and the rest of our family office team on a weekly basis. It all requires a lending relationship, if you will, to make those things happen.

Teague: Right. What we really do with our clients when they come to us with a need, like a wedding or college or pool or whatever the case may be, we try to offer a better solution than what they were originally thinking of on how to fund. For example, we just had a doctor finishing up a house. He was a little short on his construction funds, and he was trying to figure out how we could extend that loan. Well, extending a construction loan is really difficult because you have to stop the project, refile your liens. There’s a lot to that. But we were able to take his $3 million investment portfolio and simply do a pledge for $600,000 or $700,000 so he could finish his house, and then we could turn that into an equity line at the end because he already had so much available to him. That’s just one way we can apply critical thinking skills to what the need is and determine the best way to fulfill that need.

Shey: For the people that are tying into the webinar today or that are going to watch the recording, think about that situation where somebody needs an extra $600,000 to finish a construction loan. Take that down to one of the big banks, one of the 900-pound gorilla banks in the United States of America and walk that through and see how that’s going to work.

Our clients are very good problem solvers and good at coming up with solutions. But there are some out there who are looking at the family office to come up with the solutions to all of their tax issues and insurance issues, investment issues. But when you walk through that situation right there, that doesn’t get done in a couple of days. It probably doesn’t even get done. It’s probably liquidate some of that $3 million account, probably take the loss, probably pay some taxes, and none of that is good for the client, which for the people who are out there is why we highly encourage you to work with Trish and a private banking relationship because that’s how you get things done.

Teague: Right. So just a little bit about Cogent Bank for your viewers and people listening today. We are three years old. This morning, we all went downtown to celebrate our billion-dollar asset mark, which we are very, very proud of, considering that we started as a $30 million bank three short years ago.

We believe can offer the broad sophistication of a larger bank coupled with the special personalized attention of a private bank. And that’s really what we try to do. Our local decision making allows us to be efficient in our process and really look at lending options from a comprehensive standpoint versus just a list of items we offer that we advertise. We do have working capital and corporate loans. And Brian, you mentioned tax situations. A lot of our self-employed people have to pay their taxes quarterly or have a different methodology than myself being a W-2 employee, where the taxes are automatically taken out. So we do signature lines quite often for those high-net-worth clients that need the ability to pay taxes, maybe perhaps before their projects are finished or there’s some kind of income event. That’s a great use of a way to meet that need of tax strategy. It’s always paid off in full by the end of the year, but it is something that we often do offer to our clients.

We also have, on the business side, really robust treasury management solutions, where we sit down with the business owner and start at the beginning. Two simple things, how do you take money in and how do you put money out? And sometimes there’s just way more efficient ways that we have learned through our experience to modify and increase cash flow.

And some of the things are just integrated payment systems or sweeps or purchase cards. There’s all sorts of different tools that we have at our disposal to help our clients really be efficient in their business operations.

Elhert: You mentioned sweeps. I’m not familiar with banking terminology. Can you tell us more about what they are and how they integrate into private banking?

Teague: Sure. They are not private banking specific and there are lots of different ways that we talk about them.

Sometimes sweeping the floor is one of them, but usually, we are referring to either the investment, an ICS account, where let’s just say you have a large liquidity position and FDIC insurance keeps you up at night. We have the ability to open an account for you and do all of the managing with the different banks ourselves. You get one statement, and you are fully FDIC covered no matter what amount you have with our bank. A great example would be Brian and I are married, I guess, just today, for just a few short seconds, and we have three children. Our FDIC coverage, if we put our kids payable on death, we would have up to five times of $250,000 as our FDIC insurance coverage with Cogent. Anything over that would automatically sweep to all the different banks. It’s a really nice service. We also ask you if you have any accounts at other banks, and if you do, we list those, and they are not part of the equation. We won’t use them for that money management because you’re already hitting FDIC limits over there. It’s a nice way to not have to run up and down the road trying to remember when your CDs mature or who’s what, where, how, when you want to take money out.

On the business side, a sweep can refer to a lot of different things. Companies that have excess cash can sweep it into, maybe, an investment account that makes a little more interest, but most of them will sweep to their business line of credit on a daily basis. And what that does is avoid interest charges on their line of credit and allow them to really utilize having those large cash balances without them just sitting here interest free.

Shey: So there’s all sorts of different ways things can be swept back and forth. It just kind of depends on what your needs are.

Elhert: I think it’s interesting that you’re talking about sweeps as if they are common knowledge. I’ve been with one of the big dog banks, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard about them as I’m standing in line to make my withdrawal or open up an account. So I see that you are a little bit more comprehensive, and you are much more forthcoming, which is great.

Are there any other advantages that you can think of with a smaller private bank versus one of the big dogs down the street? I know a lot of times our clients, with their schedules, just in general, the convenience of it being down the road or having six in the city seems to be more convenient with their lifestyle. But do you see any advantages to using a smaller bank versus one of those big dogs down the street?

Teague: Well, I think a bank can be too small and a bank can be too big. A nice middle-sized bank is probably where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck, no pun intended there, or bank for your buck, I guess I should say, because we have technology that supports us. For example, documents are signed electronically, your wire agreements are signed electronically. You do not have to come into our office to facilitate a wire, which I think is a really big deal with COVID and people having to make appointments to go in for wires, when usually, if you have to wire money, it’s a big deal and you need to do it the same day. You can’t wait a week for an appointment. I accepted a check from someone because she simply could not get into her banker to get a wire out and needed the money to order some appraisals and so forth. Those are some of the things that I think are good about a medium-sized bank, like we are.

The other thing is we’re nimble. At our billion-dollar meeting this morning, our bank president was talking about the blockchain program that we’re getting ready to start with. We’ll be one of two banks in the Southeast to offer TASSAT pay, which is a blockchain payment system. Don’t ask me all the details about it because I’m just learning as well.

He also mentioned that we’re trying to learn how to lend into the crypto market, which was news to me. But again, very forward thinking. And with a bank our size, we’re able to really embrace some of those things that are out there because our vendors and our services aren’t always Cogent proprietary. We really like to outsource vendors that are the best of the best in whatever it is that they’re doing.

Shey: Trish, you mentioned a couple of different things there and I want to go back to the sweep accounts because it entered my mind regarding the way that you delivered the message regarding sweeping different money into different accounts and avoiding expenses. No company is a company if you don’t make a profit. No bank is a bank if the bank doesn’t make a profit. But that’s not a conversation that I think any particular person out there is going to have with one of the large banks, where the large bank is going to contact you and say, “Hey, you ought to think about sweeping money here or sweeping money there to avoid higher monthly payments or whatever it may be.

Teague: Well, that’s because we sit down and review our client accounts annually. If you are at a larger bank, maybe your attention to detail as a banker is a little more fragmented because you have so many customers and you’re running in so many different directions all the time. A funny example I can give you is I have a really busy, busy, busy dual attorney family as a client, and I’ve done some shareholder loans for them in the past to buy into the practice they work for. When I sat down to look at their accounts, I noticed that they had seven figures in their checking account, but they still had these loans, which weren’t really that big loans anymore, for their shareholders. And those aren’t really a write off, I don’t think. So I said to him, “You really need to just pay these loans off. Then you get all the distributions. You’re making .4% in your checking account. I think that’s a really good idea.” And he said, “I haven’t even looked or thought about that.” And he paid them off. I don’t know that every lender would want their loans paid off, but for me, I’ve been doing this a long time, I have a really loyal group of clients, and I’m always trying to look at and manage their money as if it was my own.

Shey: I think that’s another good point that relates back to the intimate relationship inside of TSP Family Office and what we, again, try to bring as we bring our professionals together to collaborate on our client’s behalf.

Teague: I did want to mention one thing. We also have an SBA group and a USDA group. So in the event that conventional financing just doesn’t work, which sometimes for acquisition loans it doesn’t always – it depends on what the equity requirement would be, they can be a good use. I can give you an example.

We have a 40-year CPA that is going to allow his younger shareholders to buy the rest of his practice. Because they’re existing partners, even though they are less than 5% right now, we’re able to offer 100% financing on that through the SBA on a 10-year term. That’s something that, in private banking, my deal would look like 20% down with an 80% loan and maybe a five- to seven-year term. It allows people to really have that event that creates wealth for them by utilizing other divisions of our bank.

We also have equipment financing for asset-based loan. So if you aren’t in a place where you can get a conventional line of credit, you might be able to get an asset-based line. We try to be innovative in our approach. We look at other angles and we really bring in the other experts that are available to us as needed.

Shey: Kami, let me make a point quick here because there may be some clients out there going, “Hey, that may run contrary to another strategy inside the family office.” Let me ease everyone’s mind on that. What I’m referring to is most of the clients that I’ve been in a meeting with, we talk quite a bit about the problem with the insurance industry and the ability to use that product that nobody likes called life insurance as a privatized bank. We have a lot of clients that use their life insurance policies as that private bank to go out, buy equipment for the practice, put kids through college, pay for weddings, whatever it may be. That is a bank on yourself concept, if you will, or strategy that we use. That doesn’t run contrary to what Trish is bringing up there. It’s just another strategy that’s in the tool belt. And for any of the clients out there that are using that strategy, they understand that it’s no different than an investment account. It’s going to take a couple of years for those funds to grow to a point where you can actually use them for that expansion, if you will, of your practice. That’s where, again, we’re bringing in Trish and her team as another strategy to be able to implement that earlier on when you need the money.

Elhert Trish, I know that you did mention USDA lending, and we do have a question from one of our participants regarding USDA lending for farmers. Some of our clients, in addition to their professions, also enjoy farming there is a farm in their family that they’re taking over and assisting with. Can you talk a little bit more about how that works?

Teague: Yes. USDA lending, and it is a lot of times farming, but really it is a census tract eligibility. If you look on a census-type map and you see a tract that’s USDA applicable, then it allows you to have a different kind of financing through a government sponsored program. You don’t necessarily have to have a farm to get USDA financing, which is different than I really thought for most of my banking career. I pictured the eat more chicken, cow. But what it allows, and it’s a really cool product and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on it, but the top two things I would say is it gives you a 25-year fixed rate and it’s fully amortized over 25 years. These loans are typically assumable, which means if you did a loan last year at kind of the quasi-bottom of the rate environment, probably in the next three or four years, you go to sell your property, that loan agreement you have has become very valuable because you can sell your loan with your property. I’m just going to guess, no one has a crystal ball, but it would be prudent to say that maybe in three or four years the rate might be higher than what it was two years ago. So it becomes something that’s also an asset. It’s a really neat program. We have experts in it that are with our SBA group, specialty group. And if your client or participant would like to get information on it, I can certainly introduce them to our USDA experts.

Shey: Trish, let me ask you. You and I were having a conversation yesterday or the day before regarding a little bit of estate planning and titling accounts. I was sharing with you that we have a client who unfortunately just lost a parent. And as they’re trying to unwind some of the banking relationships, they discovered that they had 69 different accounts spread over a number of banking relationships. You and I were just talking a little bit on titling, and you brought up your guy’s ability to somehow bring kids onto different accounts to try to prevent the red tape and the nightmare that people go through trying to unwind that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Teague:1 Sure. We use POD, which is Payable On Death type titling with accounts for people who are either of a certain age or maybe are an only child or would like to make sure that, in the event of their death, that this money is accessible immediately because there’s so many things that happen if someone’s incapacitated and then passes away. There are expenses, there’s funeral expenses, there’s maybe having to pay for movers or estate sales or whatever the case may be. A good way to allow accessibility is to have Payable On Death added to your accounts. This means your kids can’t go clean out your checking account while you’re alive but, when you do pass away, they will have access to that bank account. And the example that we talked about was the physician that wanted his accounts titled with his tenants by the entirety but was worried about something happening to he and his wife and how his three grown children would be able to access those funds. We just added the POD for the three children, who are grown children, to their accounts.

Elhert: Just out of curiosity, is that something that’s coordinated with your customer’s estate attorney or is that something that you provide to the client?

Teague: Usually, if I’m opening a new relationship, I will ask if they have a trust or estate planning documents or how they want their accounts titled. And if they say, “I don’t know, what do you think?” –which happens a lot – we suggest different titling based on their specific situation. For example, I have a mom and a grown daughter, and the daughter is an only child, and she has no children. So they are POD on each other’s accounts. That makes it super simple because there’s not that many people involved. So in the event of one of their demises, the other person can access their account.

Shey: Kami, I think that’s a decent opening to bring up for all of our relationships throughout the country, that if you have not had your Q1 meeting with our family office team, then you may not have been introduced to the financial platform, eMoney, that is now part of all of our clients’ TSP Family Office Service. It not only allows you to congregate investment and banking accounts, it allows you to congregate any asset and any liability and then link your account so it becomes real time. And the estate documents, your insurance, investment, tax returns, all of that now gets put into our vault, which allows our team to have access to it, allows us to review and allows our legal counsel that is now part of our family office team, John Kloss, to review those. So, again, more along the lines of the estate plan, succession plan, legacy plan and wealth transfer.

Teague: And, Brian, those are my favorite statements that I get as a banker. When you do a loan, typically, you have to do a personal financial statement. Usually, it’s a time-consuming project and people don’t know what to fill in, so we do help people. One of the things that we do is we’ll help them with their annual financial statement. But it’s so simple when they simply print off a statement like yours, sign and date it, and send it my way. It then serves as a verification of liquidity. It lets me know what they have so I can come up with strategies for lending. And really is one of the best things you could do for yourself and your personal financial situation is to implement a strategy such as e-money, that allows you to have everything in one place.

Elhert: And the convenience of it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard clients say, “Well, I need to get all this stuff together. And I’m looking through shoe boxes to find this.” Or, “I have to do it every year. And yet the documents still aren’t in one place, they’re scattered all over.” So the convenience is really important when you have clients like ours who are physician-based or entrepreneurs, W-2 employees who are working 9 to 5, having to get those documents and then coordinating with a banker can be very time consuming.

Shey: Trish, one other point that I wanted to make was one of the strategies that the majority of our clients are using is hiring their kids. If they’re under 14, we now can pay them about $6,475. If they’re over 14, it’s just under $13,000 now.

Elhert: It’s $12,950. That’s the standard deduction this year.

Shey: Trish, talk to us a little bit about custodial accounts with you guys.

Teague: They’re very simple to open. I have them for my own children. All we need is their name, social security number, and, for our purposes since we do electronic signature, we need a telephone number, and we need an email address. One of the parents is typically the owner. So it’s not really any different than opening any other account. And it’s way easier than opening trust accounts. So I would encourage everyone to have some sort of accounts for their children, grandchildren. Both of my children got married in 2020, or I should say two of my three children. And then we were blessed with two grandbabies in 2021. We have just opened custodial grandchildren accounts. So all we need them to have is a social security number and, again, date of birth and full name.

Elhert: And again, it’s not necessary that they have to come into the office, right?

Teague: No, we only like dogs in our office. 😊 We have grain-free dog biscuits now here.

Elhert: Gluten free, I’m sure.

Teague: Gluten-free dog biscuits, yes. So what other things, Brian, keep you up at night thinking about that I can assist with today?

Shey: We could touch a little bit on where you guys are regarding just mortgages throughout the country. And let’s give our clients a little bit of an update on where you guys believe rates are going.

Teague: Here at Cogent, we have a full-service mortgage department that will do everything from construction loans to first-time home buyers, FHA lending, VA. So a full mortgage team. And they are able to go out of the state of Florida – we are a Florida-based bank. I think that’s important for your clients to know. Even though we are in Florida, just like you, we can travel, and, especially if they live somewhere really cool and fun, we’d love to go visit.

In private banking, we also do the construction portfolio loans. That seems to be more of what we do because when someone comes to me for a mortgage, if they fit into the – I hate to say box, because I hate boxes – but if they fit into the profile of being able to do one of the conventional secondary market loans, in the last few years those have been in the two percent ranges so that’s where we need to place those clients. But for people who are building the $5 million house or have more complicated tax returns, we do offer portfolio lending. Traditionally, those rates are a little higher than what’s out in the open market, but we keep them for the duration of the loan and we do all the servicing on them. And it’s not like it’s a point difference. It’s not a substantial difference. It’s just for those people that really want the lowest rate that they see on their Yahoo Finance ticker, sometimes we can’t compete with that.

Funny enough, though, most of my clients would rather pay the rate than have to go through the first mortgage process because it’s very to your point, of the shoe boxes and trying to figure out where everything is. That’s a very time-consuming project to go through. Whereas, on the portfolio side, we typically ask for about the same things that we ask for any other loan.

Plus, we can exceed the $3 million limit. In the traditional mortgage world, usually the cap is at $3 million, sometimes even $2 million these days. We’re able to offer our client a portfolio loan that will allow them to either purchase or construct. Typically, clients like to live in their homes until their construction is completed. So once it’s all done and they sell their other house – and they usually have some sort of cash event with that sale – they can decide if they want to keep the loan that we have in place or if they want us to hand it off to our mortgage group, in which case, a lot of times, they’ll do a large pay down and we’ll refinance them into a traditional type product. So we’re very full service on that side.

Also, on the portfolio side, we have the ability to add someone as a guarantor if they want to help their kids out, but they want them to have some skin in the game versus just buying a home for them. We give deposit discounts on our portfolio mortgages. We give good credit discounts. We give discounts for being under 65% loan to value. So there’s ways you can get that rate down, and it’s not a buy down, which is when you have to pay more to get that lower rate. You just basically have to have a relationship with us and good credit.

Elhert: That does help.

Shey: I wanted to make a comment for our viewers that the three of us were talking about the other day, and we were specifically talking about collateralizing loans. We were talking about portfolios, whether it be a brokerage account, E-Trade account, whatever it may be, and how some of the big banks require additional collateral. Clients come to us letting us know that they’ve been requested by the bank to pledge either an investment account or pledge an amount of life insurance, or that they were instructed to go out and buy another life insurance policy to collateralize the loan to go buy another practice or go buy another building or whatever it may be. It’s always a head scratcher. Trish and I were talking with Kami about the fact that you don’t need to do that. There’s normally not a reason to go out and buy additional protection to collateralize a loan. If you have current policies, if you have current investment accounts, you’re able to pledge those, even if it’s a percentage. So a million-dollar life insurance policy, the bank wants an additional $300,000 worth of collateral. It’s a simple assignment form that is signed and kept on file with the insurance company.

Teague: You are correct. Typically, when they ask you to buy more life insurance, if you already have a lot of life insurance that you’ve disclosed to them, they usually have a business card that goes along with that request, or they can do it themselves because they’re setting you up to cross sell you in some way. Here’s the best example. A plastic surgeon. No one else is doing this intricate surgery that that person is doing. So in the event of a practice buy loan, buy, sell, loan, some sort of that kind of situation, we would ask for an assignment of life insurance and disability – occasionally, depending on what the terms of the loan are and how risky it is and how much of it isn’t secured. The first thing we look at is if they have some life insurance that they can just simply, to your point, do an assignment form with. And there would be no need to go get a new policy, unless that was the client’s choice.

Elhert: Yes. Is that referencing like keyman insurance, then? Is that where it would be specific to keyman insurance?

Teague: Keyman insurance would be specific to a business partnership, and that would be a little different than what I think Brian is referencing, because the keyman life insurance policy would be, for example, if you and Brian were the owners of a company and you each wanted to have an insurance policy primarily, usually, for the specific reason of buying the other person’s share of the business upon one of them deceasing so the spouse, surviving spouse, or descendants would get the benefit of the purchase.

Shey: Kami, it’s a great question and it poked my brain again. We talk a lot about our council on staff. His name is John Kloss. Most of our clients are uploading their state documents into their vault inside their eMoney platform so John can review their will, trust, durable powers of attorney, healthcare directives, things like that. One of the areas that Trish just poked my brain on is buy, sell agreements, cross purchase plans, keyman policies – all of that comes into play, obviously, when you have a partnership. Those documents, again, can be uploaded into your vault. Our council, John, can review those for you and either tell you, “Hey, you’ve done a great job with them.” and nothing needs to be changed. Or, if there’s some attention that should be given to those, we can get back to you and let you know that.” Kami?

Teague: That is very important, Brian, because we say that business partnerships are like marriages: they’re all great, until they aren’t. And they are hard to unwind unless you have the proper planning in place. We jokingly refer to that as the prenup of the business world, because we all agree we really like each other, but if in the event we decide we don’t like each other, it’s really nice to have a plan on how to unwind.

Shey: And one more point on that. There are always two questions there. The first question is, do you have a buy, sell agreement? Do you have a cross purchase plan? Do you have the documents in place? And most of the time the answer is no, but sometimes the answer is yes. If the answer is, “Yes, we have those in place,” the second question is, are they properly funded? That answer is inevitably almost always no or what does that mean? Because they don’t take the second step. So again, highly encourage you to think about that if you’re a partner out there and have those reviewed.

Elhert: I think that’s important, too, because a lot of times, we see our clients joining those partnerships maybe right out of college. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they had their family friend sell them some keyman insurance that maybe was sufficient at that time, but they’ve grown exponentially, and things have changed so much that it may not even be in their best interest.

I think the review is also really, really important because years go by so quickly and so you just lose sight of it. We see this a lot with legacy planning and, like you said, that keyman insurance. Things have changed so much from the time that they graduated and began their partnership to where they are now. We encourage our clients to have all of these documents in the vault so we can get the full picture. That way, when we are reviewing and collaborating together, we have the big picture and know exactly where they’re standing and can provide that information to other individuals that are part of their family office that we want to collaborate with as well.

Teague: Right, right.

Elhert: We have a question from a viewer for Trish. Does Cogent support any industry specifically?

Teague: I would say that we do have a very strong medical and legal specialty. We do have a lot of doctors and lawyers in our books, and we have tried to create products that tailor specifically to their situation, such as partnership buy-ins, the SBA for acquisition of other practices, the planning piece of having your accounts titled properly, whether you’ve decided to go with wage account type titling, or if you want to have joint tenants by the entirety. So there are different things that we’ve tried to do to make us, for lack of a better word, user-friendly with physicians and attorneys.

The electronic signature is a big thing that allows busy people to do their banking on the go, which seems to be the top priority for a lot of people these days. And then I would also say that we are really good on the just business side, like the corporate side of our bank. We have a lot of long-time experienced commercial lenders that have different specialties depending on who they are and what bank they grew up in, for lack of a better word. So we have lenders that are very industrial specific and do a really good job with those industrial-type clients, those in the industrial space.

I think my specialty would be entrepreneurs and then the medical legal space. I also have a lot of clients that either manufacture or print or do skilled labor as a business. So just a variety of clients.

But the top thing that I think we are really good at is figuring out efficiencies with any business and being able to bring to the table streamline solutions for their businesses. We have a little catchphrase that we’re moving you forward, and that’s really what we try to do every day.

Elhert: Great. That’s what we’re trying to do as well. So it works out perfect.

Shey: If no other questions, let me give a closing comment that, again, just entered my head. For the viewers out there, again, we’re in Q1. If you have not had a quarter one meeting, have not been introduced to the eMoney platform, I would highly encourage you to reach out to your relationship manager if you haven’t been reached out to by us. Pick up the phone and make that call.

For the people out there that have had that meeting, I commend all of you for embracing the eMoney financial platform and the vault. It allows our team to collaborate when you’re not in the meeting with us. Inside the TSP Family Office, again, intimate relationship, collaboration of professionals, our 400 relationships all over the country have different needs, different desires. People are moving from different states, they have tax issues, they have gains issues inside the different accounts, and we’re able to review all of that. And then again, with today’s private banking platform, if you will, coming to you again, if you have a need or desire in the banking world, then again, reach out to your relationship manager and let’s get that scheduled.

Teague: Yes, thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to sit and talk with you all.

Elhert: Very informative, Trish. Thank you so much for taking the time and, again, like Brian said, if you have any further questions or have any interest, please feel free to reach out to us at (772) 257-7888. We’re more than happy to coordinate with Trish and we look forward to talking more about the family office.

Brian, thanks so much for joining us. Always a pleasure. And if we didn’t answer your question, email us at mailto:info@tspfamilyoffice.com?subject=Private Banking. I want to thank everybody for joining us on this Friday morning, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.