Trust Tickler: Automating Your Bank's Trust Operations

As the bank or credit union’s trust officer, you’re ultimately responsible for ensuring a friction-free customer experience. Trouble is, managing the many moving parts of trust accounts can seem like an impossible endeavor. No two trusts are exactly alike, each having its own unique and complex relationships, stipulations, and ongoing obligations. Manual ticklers and spreadsheets are common solutions for tracking tasks and document requirements. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you would agree, both can be susceptible to human error and oversights. In this article, we’ll explore how an integrated trust tickler, such as AccuAccount, can streamline your institution's trust management workflow and help you deliver on your commitment to a friction-free customer journey.

Automating New Accounts

What is your bank or credit union’s current process for onboarding new trust accounts? If you’re still reliant on paper documents, it may go something like this: The account is booked to your trust core, the application, agreement, and related documentation are filed, and someone from your team begins working through a new account checklist. It’s an extremely tedious and time-consuming process, especially in the world of trusts, which are known to be paper-intensive. On the other hand, if you were using an integrated trust tickler, such as AccuAccount, you could automate most of the follow-up work. Here’s how:

Integration to Your Trust Core: AccuAccount integrates with the banking industry’s top trust core systems, simplifying the onboarding of new customers and accounts. When an account is booked to your core, AccuAccount goes to work and automatically creates matching records and document placeholders. Based on the type of trust account (estates, guardian, land trusts, etc.), AccuAccount will prepopulate the account record with the appropriate document placeholders. For example, an IRA account would include prepopulated placeholders for the IRA agreement and fee schedule.

Reduce New Account Exceptions: In addition to reminding your team what to collect, AccuAccount also accommodates exception grace periods before documents start to appear in your exception reports. Once the allotted time has passed, AccuAccount will flag documents as exceptions and include them in your daily (or weekly) exception email reports. As trust documents are received, AccuAccount automatically clears the exception - eliminating the need to update spreadsheets or checklists.

Efficiency for Ongoing Responsibilities

As you know all too well, collecting upfront account documentation is only one small aspect of managing trust accounts. Successful trust departments implement systems that streamline the countless downstream services provided to clients. AccuAccount’s built-in trust tickler can automate your service delivery and recordkeeping processes. Here are just a few ways trust departments use AccuAccount to become more efficient:

Simplified Tax Return Management: Filing client tax returns is a multi-step process that can require significant coordination and follow-up. With AccuAccount, you can build a workflow rule that reminds your team to collect tax-related information at exactly the right moment. Rest easy knowing that AccuAccount’s exception reports bring issues into the forefront, thereby minimizing the potential for filing delays.

Reliability for Annual Reviews: When things get busy, it’s easy to hit the “snooze” button on calendar reminders. Hit snooze too many times, and an annual review could turn into a missed opportunity for the customer and your financial institution. AccuAccount’s intuitive exception reporting creates accountability for your team and value for your customers.

Safeguards for Insurance Policies: Overlooking a single invoice could have devastating impacts for customers/members and your bank or credit union alike. AccuAccount creates transparency into insurance renewals, payment due dates, and previously scanned-in policies.

Bill Payment Recordkeeping: Maintaining file cabinets full of paid utility bills consumes bank and credit union resources and presents a threat of information loss. Alternatively, scanning paid bills into AccuAccount creates a paper trail without consuming precious real estate or posing unnecessary risks. Best of all, AccuAccount’s account-based architecture provides a 360-degree view of each customer’s interactions, services, agreements, and documents. With a few clicks, you can easily access pending exceptions, recently scanned documents, and other relevant details for any given customer.

Trust Our Trust Tickler

If you’re tired of a piecemeal approach to trust exception tracking, perhaps it’s time to try AccuAccount. Let’s chat to discuss your trust department’s needs. Our team supports more than 15,000 bankers worldwide on AccuAccount, and we’re excited to help you become a more successful trust department.

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