When a trust company changes hands, someone eventually has to answer the telephone. In February 2021, as Midland Trust Company prepared to acquire ATG Trust, the people involved were talking about culture, familiar voices and the families at the other end of the line. Heath Sorenson, then Midland Trust’s president, emphasized treating beneficiaries and their families with empathy and respect.
It was a revealing choice of emphasis for a transaction announcement. There were investment capabilities to discuss, technology to combine and offices to relocate. Sorenson put beneficiaries into the conversation. The people whose interests a trust exists to serve were part of the explanation for why the two businesses belonged together.
Five years later, he is executive vice president and CEO of Associated Trust Company. His working world still contains the same combination: financial expertise, organizational machinery and relationships that need to survive changes in the organization. The machinery receives fewer compliments. It nevertheless has to work.
The familiar voice in a transaction
The ATG agreement brought together an established trust business and a buyer based within Midland States Bancorp. ATG Trust had a 22-year history. Its president and CEO, Kathy Van Eeuwen, emphasized continuity for clients, including the intention to preserve their service teams. The proposed move to a shared downtown Chicago location would bring ATG employees and Midland’s Chicago office together.
For Sorenson, the fit included how the organizations treated families. For the seller, retaining colleagues and sustaining service were explicit considerations. This gives the transaction a human scale: the legal agreement concerned businesses; the day-to-day consequences concerned the people administering accounts and the clients depending on them.
Acquisitions have a vocabulary of their own. Expanded capabilities sound persuasive in an announcement. A familiar colleague picking up the telephone is easier to picture. That detail makes this episode a useful opening to Sorenson’s career, because so much of his work has concerned the systems and people behind the advice.
“We advocate for trust beneficiaries and their families with empathy and respect.”
Heath Sorenson · February 2021
An accountant’s beginning, three Illinois campuses
Sorenson’s education moves through three Illinois institutions. He earned a bachelor’s degree in accountancy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MBA at Northern Illinois University. He attended Illinois from 1991 to 1995. His Northern Illinois MBA belongs to the class of 2001.
He also completed Northwestern University’s financial-planning curriculum. His qualifications include the Certified Financial Planner designation, along with credentials in fiduciary and investment risk and trust operations. These are different areas of preparation, which matters when looking at the breadth of his later responsibilities.
Accountancy concerns how financial activity is recorded and understood. Financial planning brings individual goals into view. An operating role asks how work gets done across an organization. Those distinctions offer a way to read his career without treating the letters after his name as a substitute for the work. A business card is a small surface on which to explain several decades.
Urbana-ChampaignBachelor’s degree
IllinoisMaster of Business Administration
UniversityFinancial-planning curriculum
Years spent making the parts connect
He worked at Midland States Bank and Midland Wealth Management from May 2010 through December 2024. From February 2017, he also served as president and director of Midland Trust Company. His work there extended into the operating side of wealth management, including responsibilities at Midland Wealth Advisors.
There were overlapping affiliations. He served as chief operating officer at CedarPoint Investment Advisors between March 2017 and September 2022. He also held Raymond James affiliations and an earlier registration with AMCORE Investment Services beginning in 2002. Registrations and employment dates describe different professional relationships; they do not form a tidy procession of one job replacing another.
There are dated qualifications behind that range of work. Sorenson passed the Series 7 general securities examination in June 2002 and the Series 24 general securities principal examination the following month. He added the Series 53 municipal securities principal examination in 2004 and the Series 65 investment-adviser law examination in 2014. The dates show professional preparation continuing well beyond his university years.
That untidiness is useful. Financial organizations contain connected businesses, each with its own responsibilities. Sorenson’s career crosses those boundaries. His earlier experience included investment and capital-market operations at AMCORE/BMO, as well as a registered-principal and branch-manager role at Raymond James. By the time Associated recruited him, his experience covered both advisory activity and the work required to run a wealth business.
- Midland employment begins
- Midland Trust president and director
- Joins Associated in December
- Announced CEO handoff on February 1
The signature beneath the service
There is another way to encounter Sorenson’s Midland years: beneath the figures in a quarterly trust-company filing. Midland Trust Company’s September 2023 report identifies him as president in its certification section. The document concerns the company’s financial condition and income, with an officer certifying the information.
It is a less picturesque setting than a client meeting. It is also part of what a trust-company president does. Responsibility appears in a signature, a title and an obligation to stand behind a statement. The language is formal because the task is formal.
In 2021, Sorenson was part of Midland’s wealth-management senior leadership as chief operating officer. Taken together, these details give substance to a title that can otherwise sound abstract. There is the outward-facing business of relationships, and there is the internal business of administration. Both require somebody’s attention.
The juxtaposition with his ATG remarks is instructive. Empathy describes a way of treating beneficiaries. Certification describes accountability for the institution serving them. Each belongs in the same career story, even if only one is likely to appear in a client brochure.
A handoff with a calendar
Sorenson joined Associated Private Wealth on December 9, 2024. The announced plan gave him a second date: February 1, 2025, when he would become CEO of Associated Trust Company. John Thayer, the incumbent, would move into a senior leadership advisory role. Sorenson would report to Jayne Hladio, president of Associated Private Wealth.
The arrangement placed his arrival within an existing leadership structure. It also brought a familiar professional connection: in a 2023 post about joining Midland, investment executive Ryan Lange had publicly acknowledged Hladio, Sorenson and Betsy Pierson for the foundation they had built there.
Lange was joining Midland’s registered investment adviser business as chief investment officer. His acknowledgment linked Sorenson and Hladio to the investment side of that organization before their later Associated roles. It is a specific professional connection across the two chapters, with a colleague describing their work together while it was underway, rather than looking back after a new appointment.
The Associated remit covered personal, corporate and institutional trust services, investment management, retirement-plan solutions and trust administration. Strategy and revenue growth sat beside technology, risk, operations and compliance. Read the list slowly and the operating background becomes relevant: the job requires attention to how these responsibilities fit together.
There was a personal note in his arrival, too. Sorenson described himself and his wife, Tiggi, as lifelong Midwest residents and said they looked forward to meeting clients and participating in the community. The appointment identified primary offices in Wisconsin and Illinois. His new role widened his responsibilities within a region he already knew.
By 2026, the next chapter had names
In September 2026, Associated announced Kelly Mould as managing director of Trust and Advisory Services, reporting to Sorenson. Her responsibilities included leading trust relationship managers and wealth advisors. She brought experience in regional wealth leadership and a legal background in family and estate planning.
The same announcement included Chicago-based Tom Baranko in fiduciary administration and an expanded Illinois remit for Milwaukee wealth leader Joe Haas. These details show the organization connecting specialties across city boundaries. Sorenson’s role sits within that wider effort, alongside other executives responsible for private banking and wealth services.
Baranko’s work also gives the phrase fiduciary administration some useful detail. His responsibilities span governance, administration practices, policies and procedures, risk management and regulatory readiness. Colleague development belongs on that list as well. It is a role concerned with how professional judgment is organized and supported across the trust business, even when the client relationship begins in another city.
Two days earlier, the Twin Cities announcement had introduced four more professionals: Therese Pershall in advisor strategy, Gracia Cavanaugh in wealth planning, Kyle Foster in wealth advice and Drew Burke in portfolio management. Each addition addressed a different part of the work, from practice management to investment portfolios.
Sorenson described room to build on Associated’s existing Twin Cities presence. His stated ambition was to give clients access to more resources through professionals working across disciplines. The announcement provides a concrete picture of what that ambition involves: named people, distinct responsibilities and a requirement to coordinate.
Four roles. Different expertise. A shared client relationship.
The work after the announcement
A trust-company career can be told through appointments and transactions. Sorenson’s also allows a closer view of what sits between them: education, operating responsibilities, regulatory accountability and the relationships through which financial services reach people.
The 2021 ATG episode and the 2026 hiring announcements belong together for that reason. One concerns preserving continuity as a business changes ownership. The other concerns adding expertise as a wealth organization expands. Both bring the practical question back to the same place: how the organization’s decisions will be experienced by clients.
His next chapter is already visible in the people joining Associated and the responsibilities they are taking on. Keeping those parts connected is continuing work. Somewhere beyond the appointment announcement and the organization chart, a client will pick up the telephone. The institution needs to know who should answer.