Weekly Market Intelligence - Nov 1, 2025: Trust industry M&A hits "platform completion" mode
It was a plumbing-heavy week—but the boring moves matter most.
🔴 What actually happened:
→ TMF doubled down on the Baltics (Nordgain acquisition) → JTC's take-private talks got another extension (Permira/Warburg still circling) → Opera bought TWICE in 30 days (Accuro + Meritus = $71.6bn AUA across 8 jurisdictions)
🔴 What it means:
The 2025 consolidation wave isn't about megadeals anymore.
It's about platform completion—filling geographic gaps, unifying data systems, and getting ready to deploy AI-enabled services in 2026.
Three things we're tracking:
1️⃣ Operations: You can't deploy LLM-based entity management if your ledgers, KYC files, and trust deeds are in 12 different formats. TMF, Ocorian, Opera are all standardizing right now.
2️⃣ Geography: Singapore + Baltics = this week's live entry points. Harneys got a Singapore MAS trust licence (28 Oct). That's a signal—APAC families want BVI structuring plus on-the-ground Asia presence.
3️⃣ AI strategy shift: No one announced "AI for trust admin" this week. Instead? Legal hires, data-governance work, BCR approvals. The smart money is building audit trails and compliance scaffolding before deploying productivity tools.
The 2026 prediction: Tokenized real estate and fund interests will launch at scale. The firms winning that business are doing the boring work right now—licensing, key management, data cleanup.
