December 16, 2020

Dear Clients,

This has been a challenging and unusual year for many. Perhaps you are as eager as we are to put 2020 behind us.  But in many ways, we hope this difficult and volatile year demonstrated the value proposition to which Edge strives to deliver.  Examples of this include:

• Helping organize the key parts of your financial life and constructing a plan designed to meet your personal, generational, and philanthropic goals.
• Bringing transparency on the financial markets so you know what you own, why you own it, and what to expect.
• Providing safe and timely reporting so you know how your financial plan is progressing.
• Interfacing with your tax, trust and estate, lending, insurance, and/or other financial advisors.
• Assisting nonprofit institutions in achieving their mission.
• Doing the extra work so you don’t have to.
• Always making ourselves available to you.
• Tailoring our work to your needs.

I have never been so proud of our team members. Quickly transitioning to a remote work environment in March, we relied on our team’s decades of professional experience and strong interpersonal relationships to collaborate and serve you in a high-quality way. We successfully navigated the new processes of our client service, investment execution, and operational workflows without interruption.

Information is always valuable but particularly in times of a pandemic, an election year, and remarkably volatile capital markets. In addition to our constant one-on-one communication with you, we launched our Speaker Series with timely insights from experts throughout the year to keep you informed of many topics such as health, education, and cyber-security.

We continue to invest in the business and several of our newer initiatives provided value during the pandemic. The launch of our new client app and the Edge Vault in January provided a simpler way to view your financial picture and allow you to store important life documents in a secure and coordinated manner. In fact, the number of our active users more than doubled this year.

Thanks to record low interest rates and a new government assistance program to small businesses, we assisted many of you in seeking better financing terms for your personal and business borrowing needs.  Our expanding financial planning team has never been busier helping you plan for topics from special one-time tax benefits in the CARES Act to potential permanent changes to tax and estate law.  We work hard to protect your broad financial interests as a fiduciary.

Another initiative we will continue to enhance in coming months is our capabilities to address financial risk related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics and to support tailored expressions of your family values within investment portfolios.  A lack of standardized reporting and application of data has hindered more nuanced integration in the past, but we anticipate an improvement in the coming years. If these issues are of interest to you and your next generation of stewards, we encourage you to start these conversations with your Edge financial advisor.

As we soon enter our fifteenth year of service, I am happy to report our Assets Under Advisement are currently $5.5 billion and we were recently recognized by Barron’s as one of the Top 100 RIA Firms in the country. We continue investing in our people and business to provide better value to you and your family. During the year, we had several people join the Edge team including Bretaigne Black as Director-Client Specialist, Ava Arjmand as Vice President- Portfolio Management, and Amy Tierney as our Director of Operations to enhance our operational excellence. We are also proud to announce the promotion of Ginger Dorsett, Nanny McFadden, and Becca Montes.

We’re honored by the trust placed in us and appreciate your business. As always, please provide us with constructive feedback on how we can better serve you. Thank you for your continued support and please keep Edge in mind when you believe our service would benefit others. Most importantly, we cannot wait to see you in person once the pandemic passes!

Respectfully,

Harry Jones