FIDUCIARY

FIDUCIARY – person, company or association holding assets IN TRUST for one or more beneficiaries.
-Barron’s Dictionary of Finance & Investment Terms

A “Fiduciary” has a duty of care known as a "prudent person standard of care." This requires that an entity acting as fiduciary must act first and foremost with the needs of beneficiaries in mind. Consequently, strict care must be taken to avoid "self-dealing" and to ensure no conflict of interest arises between the fiduciary and a client.


A Fiduciary is not a trusted person because of a license, strong financials, or a company name, but because of the trust that is borne out of interpersonal relationships in which "trust" is built and developed over an extended period. It is the compounding of trustworthy acts of service that develops a credit balance of trust between individuals. Cornerstone is a natural extension of the trust our clients have in us and in our integrity and professionalism.

POWERS AND DUTIES OF THE FIDUCIARY

A Fiduciary normally has full, absolute, and exclusive power, control, and authority over the property entrusted to it, subject to the provisions of an underlying agreement between the settlor of the trust and the trustee.

Its powers and authorities are broad and may include for instance:

A settlor may appoint a trusted third-party protector to have oversight over the affairs of the trust for and on behalf of a Settlor and to direct and instruct the trustee on issues of management, administration, investments, operations, finance, and distributions.

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Trust is earned over time. Our clients know us well. Reciprocal trust is born from a deep commitment to integrity, transparency, truthfulness, hard work, confidentiality, and professionalism. Our friendship and business relationships developed over decades allow us to hold assets "in trust" in order to assist and help families preserve and increase their wealth or close complex transactions through creative, risk-averse, structuring processes.
“Trust”, in the Biblical sense, is always borne out of a personal relationship. It never applies to an impersonal corporate relationship even if a corporate entity is licensed to provide fiduciary services. Consequently, trust qualifies individuals, not corporations or entities.
Cornerstone assists high and ultra-net-worth individuals, families, family offices, and their respective trusts or trustees to develop, structure, engineer, and execute complex transactions. We provide unique and visionary transactional structuring expertise and wealth management structures and services that reduce risk while preserving and expanding the wealth of our clients.
We only do business through referral. Cornerstone only engages with long-time trusted friends and their family offices, to provide family-type fiduciary services. We only work through referrals, and do not solicit business. Our clients prefer the friendly interpersonal services of trusted friends and advisors to those of professional institutions in which a client is often treated as no more than a number, just another source of income. This is not the case at Cornerstone where our clients become our close friends.
We specialize in structuring and successfully closing complex local and international transactions that require the management of many transactional components before a successful closing can occur. Our approach allows ready, willing, and able counterparties to remain in the background of the transaction until all risks have been eliminated or neutralized, all the provisions and conditions of the transaction have been met, and a transaction is ready to close confidentially and with the utmost professionalism.
Cornerstone’s approach often begins with the creation of a flexible protector-directed unit trust where a first-moving party transfers assets to the trust to enable the trustees to provide a series of specialized services to satisfy all the terms and conditions of an agreement between two or more transaction counterparties before the 2nd moving party deposits cash in trust to close a transaction. This includes an escrow-like closing process that involve many complex closing components.
Our fiduciary services are usually provided as a component of a much larger and more complex transaction engineering process, where a trusted third-party intermediary is needed to ensure counterparties are brought together to close a transaction after all transactional, anti-money-laundering due diligence, regulatory compliance, source of funds identification, reputational and other risks have been dealt with satisfactorily before the closing can occur.
Our global network. Our global network of trustworthy professionals, law firms, advisors and specialty services providers developed over a long period of time, bring expertise in transactions that require extensive due diligence, compliance oversight, legal and accounting reviews, professional appraisals, local inspections, investigations, and the development of legal structures that are safe, tax-efficient, and sustainable long-term.
Our methods and processes: We hold a worldwide license to proprietary intellectual property, technologies, and systems that enable us to develop flexible customized transaction structuring solutions on request. We can address complex transaction structuring challenges for the benefit of our clients.
In a fast-changing world, such proprietary methods allow us to provide visionary, tailor-made transaction structuring solutions that protect clients' assets in complex business, commercial or international transactions while risks are being addressed and neutralized before a transaction can close.
Flexible & cost-effective: Our Management Expense Ratio (MER) is very competitive and cost-effective. We also work for our clients on a success fee basis in situations where we must do the entire structure to protect our clients' identity until a transaction is ready to close and all risks have been removed based on our investigative work and due diligence.
Our clients' wealth includes high value investments in precious metals. The total combined assets, spread over several continents, is valued at more than $200 Billion. This includes physical gold, precious metal portfolios, and gold-backed obligations. We also specialize in structuring transactions that require payment in gold, in accordance with 31 U.S. Code § 5118 (the gold clause).
Cornerstone Fiduciary Services LLC
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