American Trust Custody

American Trust Custody is recasting the role of custody from a back-office function into an essential operating infrastructure at the core of AmericanTCS’s retirement ecosystem. Acting as an integrated B2B partner, it helps financial intermediaries outsource complexity, enabling them to scale more confidently.

The fabric of the broader AmericanTCS retirement ecosystem includes trust and custody, fiduciary oversight, recordkeeping and administration, and technology-driven workflow automation. Together, these capabilities enable bank trust departments, 401(k) recordkeepers, TPAs, and insurers to consolidate vendors without compromising specialization or control over the client front end. The value lies in fewer handoffs, tighter data continuity, and faster implementation, at a time when margins are narrowing and regulatory cadence is accelerating.

“We support financial intermediaries through a collaborative wholesale model that spans the full retirement plan lifecycle,” states Tim Friday, president and CEO.

The Custody Cornerstone

As the cornerstone of custody within AmericanTCS, the business delivers trust and custody services, including directed trustee, paying agent, and participant distributions, as well as clearing and settlement, and IRA solutions. Clients can then connect to adjacent capabilities as needs evolve across the plan lifecycle, supported by over 700 dedicated employees and a platform serving over 125,000 retirement plans and more than $178 billion in aggregate assets. The proposition scales within a wholesale ecosystem that supports a little over 60 percent of defined contribution plans nationally, aligning specialization with operating leverage.

Its differentiator lies in combining relationship centric service with proprietary technology to enable institutions to tailor operations to their own workflows rather than conforming to rigid vendor templates. The proprietary trust accounting system is purpose built for the nuances and edge cases of retirement plan lifecycles—trading complexity, cash controls, participant distributions, and data integrity— where off-the-shelf systems fall short. Custody’s role within the platform ensures a single, accountable architecture that standardizes the plumbing, creating efficiency while preserving customization, which in turn shapes client outcomes.

American Trust Custody also emphasizes the expertise of its people, which includes teams of subject matter experts, program leaders, and strategists who bring decades of experience and industry certifications. Clients benefit not only from technology, but also from talent handpicked to understand the nuances of trust and custody at scale.

The Key Account Method

Delivery is built around a disciplined key account method. Each client is assigned a dedicated strategist, program leadership, relationship managers, administrators, and subject matter experts. No proposal advances until a rigorous discovery process has surfaced operational realities, constraints, and objectives. The structure mirrors a clinical case review, including intake, diagnostics, committee-level solutioning, and prescription. That method reduces implementation risk, aligns services with how each institution truly operates, and creates a repeatable loop that feeds client insights into product roadmaps, automation priorities, and service enhancements. High client advocacy is reflected in expansion into adjacent services over time and an 80 NPS—a rare mark in financial services.

A Glimpse into the Future of Custody

American Trust Custody’s vision is intentionally straightforward: integrate only where it adds value, scale only where it strengthens resilience, and automate where it prevents manual workarounds.

“We will not acquire or integrate anything that does not add measurable value to client operations,” says Friday.

This disciplined approach extends to mergers and acquisitions. American Trust Custody and AmericanTCS look only at growth-oriented firms that add real value to clients. The priority remains on expanding capabilities that fit the culture and directly benefit plan providers.

In today’s environment of consolidation, fee compression, and rapid regulatory change, custody’s integrated role within AmericanTCS helps intermediaries maintain a client facing focus on plan design, advice, and distribution while shifting operational risk to infrastructure engineered for volume, resiliency, and continuous improvement.

The model’s orientation is clear: flexibility over rigidity, integration over sprawl, and automation over manual friction—a path for converting complexity into durable, scalable operating leverage.