The most revealing thing about Equity Trust Company is the verb in its name. It does not sell the apartment building, choose the private company or tell a saver whether bitcoin belongs in a retirement plan. It holds. It records. It reports. It moves money when instructions satisfy the rules. In a financial culture built around predictions, the Westlake, Ohio, company has made a large business out of administration.
That sounds dull until you consider the object being administered. An ordinary brokerage IRA is usually a well-lit aisle of stocks, bonds and funds. A self-directed IRA can open a door onto real estate, private loans, precious metals, closely held companies, cryptocurrency and foreign exchange. The tax wrapper may be familiar; the contents are not. Each unusual asset brings documents, valuations, transaction requests and restrictions that do not fit neatly into a discount broker's machinery.
Equity Trust lives in that mismatch. It is a South Dakota-chartered trust company and directed custodian, with its main office in suburban Cleveland. The company traces its lineage to a brokerage Richard Desich Sr. started in Elyria in 1974, the same year Congress enacted ERISA and established the modern IRA framework. The predecessor qualified as a non-bank IRA custodian in 1983. Equity Trust Company itself was formed with a South Dakota trust charter in 2003.
Freedom arrives with a filing cabinet
The company's customers are people whose investment lives do not fit a standard menu. They include a landlord who wants an IRA to buy a rental property, an accredited investor considering a private fund, a metals buyer, a crypto investor and a self-employed owner who wants a Solo 401(k). On the professional side are registered investment advisers, broker-dealers, asset sponsors and fintech platforms that would rather outsource retirement-account custody and back-office obligations.
The central problem is not simply access. It is maintaining an account's administrative integrity after access is granted. An IRA-owned property cannot be treated like a personal checking account. Private assets need values for reporting. Transactions must be titled and funded correctly. Certain dealings with the owner, relatives or controlled businesses can become prohibited transactions. The custodian prepares statements and reports to the IRS, but it does not replace the investor's lawyer, accountant or financial adviser.
“The opportunity and the burden of self-direction arrive in the same envelope.”What Equity Trust's business model makes visible
That boundary is easy to miss and essential to the product. Equity Trust says it does not offer or sponsor proprietary investments, recommend providers or perform investment due diligence for the account owner. The investor chooses. The custodian administers. If a private deal fails, custody was never a seal of quality. Investment freedom comes paired with responsibility.
A product made of connections
Equity Trust's most legible product is the self-directed IRA, available in familiar tax forms including Traditional, Roth, SEP and SIMPLE accounts. It also supports Health Savings Accounts and Coverdell education accounts. The differentiator is the asset range, not a novel tax category. A self-directed IRA follows the same tax code as another IRA; the custodian is simply willing and equipped to administer a wider set of holdings.
In 2024 the company introduced the Universal IRA, an attempt to reduce an old annoyance: keeping public securities at one institution and alternative assets at another. The account can hold listed securities alongside eligible alternatives. Its published terms include up to 50 commission-free eligible trades in U.S.-listed securities per calendar year, with regulatory, options and other charges still applicable. The promise is less account sprawl, not free investing without conditions.
The division of labor
The other strategic product is connection itself. WealthBridge, launched inside the myEQUITY account system in 2023, gives clients a route to integrated private-market platforms. StartEngine connected pre-IPO offerings in 2025, advertising eligible opportunities with minimums starting at $15,000. Crowd Street later connected private-market funds. Rather than asking money and forms to hop between unrelated portals, the integrations tie the investment platform to the custodial account.
The partner list sketches the market Equity Trust wants to occupy. BiggerPockets and PassivePockets bring real-estate education and communities. Holdfolio brings private real-estate offerings. Tastyfx built self-directed IRA onboarding into its foreign-exchange flow. Onbe powers Expense Pass, a card-based service for paying expenses on IRA-owned property more quickly. SEPira(k)'s technology underpins the Equity Solo 401(k), launched in 2025 with online plan setup, integrated banking and automated recordkeeping for owner-only businesses.
Custody is not endorsement. Equity Trust's scale and regulation concern the account infrastructure. They do not guarantee an asset, validate its promoter or remove market, liquidity, fraud or tax risk. Customers remain responsible for investment selection and should use qualified advisers where needed.
How the quiet machinery earns
Equity Trust is privately held by the Desich family and does not publish the financial detail of a listed bank. Its business model is visible in its fee schedules. Retail clients pay for account setup, annual custody and maintenance, transactions and some asset-specific work. Annual charges can depend on account type and value. Institutional customers pay for directed trustee, compliance and back-office services. Affiliates may pay or receive referral fees around certain third-party services.
This aligns revenue with administrative complexity and account scale, though it also creates the comparison shoppers must make carefully. Rocket Dollar and Alto market more software-forward experiences. Entrust, STRATA, Directed IRA and New Direction compete more directly in specialist custody. Fidelity, Schwab and Vanguard dominate conventional retirement brokerage but generally do not directly custody the same breadth of unconventional assets. Equity Trust sits between those worlds: older than the fintech challengers, narrower than a universal bank, and unusually fluent in illiquid assets.
Its moat is partly procedural memory. Real-estate closings, private placements and metal storage do not reward a novice operations team. The company has built specialized service groups and expanded by acquisition, adding Sterling Trust business in 2009, Principal Trust assets in 2014, American Pension Services accounts in 2015 and Midland Trust in 2023. The Midland deal also added people and offices in Florida, Illinois and South Dakota.
Scale has moved sharply in recent company announcements. Equity Trust cited more than $39 billion under custody and administration when it bought Midland in mid-2023, $58 billion at the start of 2025, $70 billion by the end of May and $81 billion at the end of that year. Those figures measure assets held and administered, not company revenue or assets owned by Equity Trust. They do, however, show how acquisitions, markets and new accounts have enlarged the operating surface.
The growth also explains why education is more than content marketing here. A prospective customer may know how to analyze a duplex but not how an IRA must take title, pay a plumber or receive rent. Equity Trust publishes guides, webinars, case studies, videos and frequently asked questions because every informed client is easier to administer. The model depends on making the rules understandable without crossing the line into personalized advice. That is a narrow editorial lane: explain what an account can hold, describe the process, repeat the risks and send legal or tax judgments to qualified professionals.
For customers, the practical test is equally plain. The right custodian is not necessarily the one with the longest asset list. It is the one whose fees, service model, transaction speed and experience match the asset being held. A private fund subscription and a rental-house repair create different operational demands. Equity Trust's breadth is useful, but investors still need to compare the total cost and ask how quickly a specific request will move before transferring an account.
An old custodian learns the platform game
The company culture presents a blend of family ownership and professionalized scale. George Sullivan, a former State Street executive, became chief executive in 2019. Equity Trust names excellence, passion, integrity and collaboration as core values, describes formal career-development and inclusion programs, and reported more than 500 employees in early 2025. Glassdoor placed it among its 2025 Employees' Choice Best Places to Work, while Smart Business included it in a regional Smart Culture group.
Awards are useful signals, though products make the strategy clearer. The company was Investopedia's best overall self-directed IRA pick for six consecutive years through 2025. Yet the more consequential change is from custodian as destination to custodian as embedded layer. WealthBridge, platform onboarding and APIs put Equity Trust closer to the moment an investor encounters an opportunity. The account can begin opening before enthusiasm cools or a PDF packet goes missing.
There is a productive tension here. Alternative assets are sold on uniqueness, but a custodian succeeds by making them repeatable. Every new route to private markets has to pass through an operating system built for titles, cash, documents and tax reporting. Equity Trust's expertise is not predicting which unusual asset will win. It is teaching unusual assets to behave, administratively, like retirement holdings.
That places the company in a valuable middle layer of the market. Above it sit investors and advisers deciding where capital should go. Below and beside it sit asset sponsors, exchanges, marketplaces, property managers, metal dealers and trading venues. Equity Trust connects them without claiming to be them. The arrangement is less glamorous than picking the next great private company. It may also be more durable.