Impactful Solutions for Fiduciaries

When the most prestigious financial institutions need a consultant to evaluate and fine-tune their trust business, they call Matthew C. Eby.

Serving as a kind of S.W.O.T. team for household-name financial institutions, Eby uses his decades of experience in financial services consulting for the wealth and asset management industries to advise on improving operations, streamlining processes and creating stability by establishing a sequence of steps that achieves repeatable and scalable results.

His illustrious career started at none other than The Northern Trust, considered the premier trust company in the world. He would then go on to hone his consulting skills while at Arthur Andersen/Andersen Consulting, also considered the leader in its field.

As Founding Managing Partner of Nth Degree Financial Solutions, Eby, with his wife and Managing Partner Joanne Eby, offer an array of services across the broad spectrum of fiduciary and non-fiduciary products provided by financial institutions, including Trust Departments, Trust Companies, Corporate Trustees, Retirement Plan Servicers, Custodians, Registered Investment Advisors, and Broker Dealer Firms.

When ePIC Services Company was taking shape, founder Carter Wilcoxson recognized the depth and breadth of Eby’s knowledge and the valuable contributions he would bring to the board of the company that is streamlining the estate planning process for the modern age.

“Carter and his team began building a virtual approach to estate planning and settlement well before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the industry’s need for digital solutions,” Eby says. “The world has gone online and what might have happened by 2030 happened in 2020 instead.”

Eby is in a position to help insurance and financial advisors keep pace with that accelerated timeline. For more than 20 years he educated financial professionals on the trust industry as a subject matter expert at Cannon Financial Institute, a leading professional development firm helping financial professionals gain advanced skillsets. He even designed and built certifications for the trust industry.

“Trusts are a very noble business because you are taking care of financial assets for people who can’t or won’t do it for themselves”, he says. “The process of settling trusts is paramount to establish ongoing stability in beneficiary care. You must be able to repeat a sequence of events and anticipate the outcomes that a client intended to create.”

He likens the trust process to baking bread. “To bake bread, you have to follow a sequence of steps,” Eby says. Missing a step or doing things out of order would not yield the desired results, he adds. “You have to stabilize the environment, before you can grow it in order to do it again and again, faster and better and care for the world.”

Applying this philosophy to trusts, understanding the mechanics, the cause and effect, of the trust process—and the sequence of events—is his specialty.

“When you are managing other people’s money, you are a fiduciary,” he explains. “That means that someone else’s money matters to me more than my own. Their success takes precedence.

This is why the highest level an advisor can attain is to be a Trusted Advisor who clients entrust with giving them advice on issues that are highly personal and extremely sensitive.”

Through trusts, financial assets may be distributed to children and grandchildren for their health, education and welfare. “A trust may exist for a generation or two before it actually distributes the assets,” Eby says. “Process and continuity for that duration of time are very, very important.”

Working with advisors and helping them master the trust process is his passion, Eby says. “I really like to teach people and help them understand that there is a reason you follow a process to get your clients the best results. By giving advisors the knowledge and confidence to discuss trusts with their clients, many more families will have the opportunity to benefit from this valuable financial instrument.”

“Because when it comes down to it,” Eby says, “the only thing that we have control over is the process and when we have that right the results speak for themselves.”

Attorney Joanne Eby has such an innate ability to comprehend complex new financial services laws and regulations that even law firms consult with her to help them decode new legal directives.

“When I read something that is newly released, I know in the first few sentences if it will be relevant for our clients,” says Eby, Managing Partner of Nth Degree Financial Solutions LLC. “My passion is understanding the laws, rules, regulations, and regulatory guidance for the asset and wealth management world so our clients can count on me to advise them. I like being the person someone is going to call to help them understand complex concepts.”

Born and raised in a small town outside Toronto, Canada, reading and learning have always played a key role in Eby’s life. By the end of grade school she was reading Shakespeare. Driven to learn, every day she saved the milk money her father gave her, drinking water instead, and banked $2,000 to help pay her way through the University of Western Ontario.

“My parents were Dutch immigrants who emigrated after World War II,” Eby says. “We learned self-reliance by watching their work ethic and by having to work ourselves for the good of our large family.”

While earning her MBA at York University, she discovered she had a gift for writing. Later hired as a technical writer by a financial services software company, her role expanded to client support because of her unique ability to explain and simplify complex systems to clients.
At the Bank of Montreal (known in the U.S. as BMO Harris Bank) she worked in a division that provided custody of financial products for major global financial institutions. “By then I understood how registered investment advisors, broker-dealers, trust companies and custodians worked because of my work at the financial services software company.”

She met her husband and business partner, Matthew Eby, when he came to audit the bank’s global custody division. And while it might not sound like the plot of a romantic comedy, it was the beginning of their personal and professional partnership, with Joanne eventually joining Matthew at Nth Degree in 2005.
Before then, she and her then-teenage son, Ben, took the steps necessary to become U.S. citizens. With Matthew encouraging her to “sharpen her saw,” she was accepted to Chicago’s John Marshall Law School and discovered how much she loved laws and regulations. “I genuinely like reading new laws and regulations from the SEC, banking, and other financial regulators,” Eby says.

This mastery attracts financial institutions who need guidance on ensuring that their activities are compliant and audit-proof. “A lot of the consulting we have done in the last 10 years has been for financial institutions that call us when something goes awry,” she says. “We are able to illuminate and explain the risks and help them on the path to compliance.”

Eby’s contribution to ePIC (ePIC Services Company, Inc., Nevada retail trust company application pending) will be to develop the compliance policies and procedures to ensure the infrastructure is built the right way. “My goal is to provide the finest compliance oversight possible to help ePIC establish their processes, infrastructure and compliance culture correctly, even if that approach requires a greater initial investment in time and resources,” she says.

Eby still reads laws and regulations for fun. While others might read legal texts to fall asleep, Eby avoids reading legal cases at night because learning about real people and real situations is so engrossing, it keeps her awake.

An experienced educator, she continues to teach on various topics, including annual training for the Bank Secrecy Act: “I love teaching bank financial examiners and auditors who, at end of the day, come up and say I made the concepts come alive and jump off the page.”

When not engrossed in compliance and the law, Eby and her husband like to enjoy the outdoors together. She says she will always be an opsimath—someone who begins, or continues, to learn late in life. “When a new law or regulation comes out, I crave it,” she says. “I love being able to synthesize it into information others can understand and to focus on the portion of the law a client needs to better perform in the business they are in.”