Firms evaluate custodians on pricing and brand. Neither is what you will care about in year two.
The custodian is not a vault. It determines how account opening feels, what can be automated, how money movement works, what data flows into your reporting, and how a client experiences the administrative side of your firm.
Those are daily experiences. Pricing is an annual conversation.
Account opening and transfer, because it is the client's first impression of your firm. Data feeds into whatever you use for reporting and billing. Money movement, because it is the most common and most sensitive client request.
And service. Specifically, whether a human answers with authority when something is wrong.
The breadth of the product shelf, for most firms. The mobile app, which clients use less than demonstrations imply. Trading costs, which have compressed to the point of near irrelevance for most advisory business.
You will not remember the pricing conversation. You will remember every transfer that took six weeks.
Demonstrations show the clean case. Ask what happens when a transfer stalls, when a client dies and the account has to be re-registered, when paperwork is rejected, when a fee bills wrongly.
How the firm handles the bad day is the actual product.
Custodians differ in the size of firm they are set up to serve. Being at the bottom of a custodian's range means being served accordingly, and that is worth knowing before rather than after.
References supplied by the custodian will be happy. Find someone who moved away and ask why. That conversation is worth more than the rest of the process.
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