In wealth management, debt is frequently viewed as a liability to be eliminated rather than a dynamic financial tool. For high-net-worth individuals, holding companies, and family trusts, customized credit represents a sophisticated mechanism to optimize cash flow, unlock illiquid equity, and capture growth opportunities without disrupting long-term investment strategies.

What is customized credit?

Customized credit transcends standard personal lending and conventional mortgages. It’s solutions-based, bespoke borrowing tailored to complex asset bases and non-standard income patterns.* Rather than relying solely on traditional T4 income metrics, custom credit evaluates personal holdings, holding companies, professional corporations, and trusts in unison.

"Customized credit serves as a core offering for high-net-worth clients with sophisticated borrowing needs,” says Charla Traquair, Director of Private Banking Credit at ATB Wealth. “Often our clients have all these assets, but don’t know how to leverage them or where to start. Our private banking advisors and credit team work with them to find new and innovative ways to help those clients unlock credit, taking their full financial picture into account.”

By taking a holistic view of both personal and corporate balance sheets, private banking advisors design financing solutions aligned directly with a client's broader financial plan and tax structure.

Mike Wilson is one of those advisors and has been working with private banking clients at ATB Wealth for more than a decade. He says just because a person makes a large salary doesn’t mean they need customized credit—it’s for clients who have unique income or net-worth situations, and need to use debt as a tool.

"Affluent clients frequently use debt as leverage to increase net worth rather than avoid it entirely,” says Mike. “When a client comes to me, my job is to tease out the problem they're trying to solve or what hurdle they're trying to overcome, and then that begins the conversation. So sometimes we jump to the end result and try to reverse engineer how we can help the person, rather than just relying on their T4 statement, which never tells the full story.  

“There could be deferrals, there could be shareholder loans, we could have a tax issue that we're trying to solve, or we could have somebody whose reported income doesn’t fully reflect their financial picture because of the structure of a deal they're working on. So we’re looking at all of those pieces and how we can help them through our credit program.”