Trust & Will launches Nevada-chartered trust company for sub-$10 million estates

Trust & Will is launching a Nevada-chartered retail trust company with legal authority to serve as a professional corporate trustee, according to a WealthManagement.com report published Oct. 16. The report describes the online estate planning provider as the first in the digital estate planning space to act as a regulated corporate fiduciary.

"With the Trust & Will Trust Company, we are evolving from the platform that helps families create an estate plan into the fiduciary that can carry one out," co-founder and CEO Cody Barbo said in the announcement.

Barbo told Wealth Management that incumbent trust companies offer a wide array of options and strong service, but maintaining that level has pushed them upmarket, raising minimums often into the tens of millions and leaving households with less than $10 million largely unserved.

"A trust holding a house, a retirement account, and a life insurance policy needs a trustee just as much as one holding millions of dollars," Barbo said. "The difference has never been the need. It has been who was willing to do the work."

The company says it will deliver what Barbo calls a "very traditional trust administration experience," largely, though not solely, on a directed trustee model, software-delivered but backed by a human fiduciary. The tasks described in the report are administrative: recordkeeping and accounting, trust tax return preparation and filing, distribution decisions made in accordance with the terms of the trust, and beneficiary communication and reporting.

The firm hopes to offer the service with no minimum account size, and fees will be based on account value and the nature of the assets held in trust. The stated aim is to shorten the time it takes to get inheritances into beneficiaries' hands.

This publication has argued that advisors who treat estate plans as static risk client defection, with 68% of advised clients open to switching, according to its August reporting. A chartered trustee that stays attached to a trust through its administration is a different product from a signed document, and it charges against the same asset base the advisor does.