U.S. trust companies are under intense regulatory scrutiny. State banking regulators with their own variations/versions of the OCC REG-9 rule, expect rigorous fiduciary controls, including documented audit trails and routine reviews. For example, interagency guidance mandates a review of every trust account at least once annually. Delaware and South Dakota, two leading trust jurisdictions, both hold trust firms to high standards. Both South Dakota leading with 120 + Trust companies while Delaware now “boasts over 60 trust companies” (mostly affiliates of major financial institutions), require a “thorough examination” of all books and a complete annual audit of “all fiduciary activities”. In short, fiduciary compliance is no longer optional or paper-based – regulators demand comprehensive, timely oversight.
Persistent Compliance Challenges
Trust department leaders report that many compliance tasks remain fragmented and manual. Key pain points include:
- Fragmented processes: Regulators note that despite stringent fiduciary compliance requirements, many trust companies “still manage these reviews via spreadsheets, email threads, and legacy systems”. This manual approach makes it easy to overlook issues or miss review deadlines.
- Incomplete audit trails: Manual workflows often leave gaps. As one compliance study found, institutions struggle with “untimely data and incomplete audit trails” and “poor exception tracking”. Without an automated system, it can be difficult to produce a clean, chronological record of every action during a trust review, exactly what examiners expect.
- Timeliness and oversight: Spreadsheet-driven scheduling leads to “missed review cycles” and delayed investigations of issues. Busy officers may forget periodic administrative tasks (e.g. annual account re-verification), creating regulatory risk.
- Unique‐asset oversight: A critical Reg-9 (Fiduciary compliance) requirement is the annual review of all unique or hard-to-value assets (real estate, private equity, insurance policies, etc.) in fiduciary accounts. Regulators explicitly warns that reviews must cover “all account assets, including unique and hard-to-value assets”. Yet without automation, tracking these bespoke assets, getting valuations, checking insurance or trust instructions and recording whether assets are appropriate is both time-consuming and easy to get wrong.
- Clunky and Glitchy: It’s not enough to get by with a system. Good systems help attract and retain staff as well as making them more efficient and their job easier.
Delaware and South Dakota Expectations
Trust companies headquartered in Delaware and South Dakota operate under some of the most rigorous fiduciary oversight in the nation. Both states demand precision, transparency, and consistency in every aspect of trust administration. Regulators in these jurisdictions expect institutions to maintain accurate and current trust records, perform timely reviews of all holdings, and document fiduciary decisions with complete audit trails. Whether through Delaware’s well-developed statutory framework and courts or South Dakota’s direct regulatory supervision and audit requirements, the message is the same — fiduciary duties must be carried out with discipline, diligence, and accountability.
BITA REG-9™: Automating Fiduciary Compliance
In this environment, trust companies are investing in technology to turn compliance into a strength. BITA REG-9 is an automated platform built specifically for trust departments and fiduciary services. It replaces ad-hoc checklists with dynamic, recurring workflows. For example, BITA REG-9 lets a bank select its choice of pre-acceptance, Initial, Administrative, Regulation-9, and Unique-Asset review questions by trust and account type; thereafter it schedules reviews automatically on the required cycle. Each morning, its rules engine runs portfolio scans: any exceptions (e.g. overdue reviews, missing valuations, or investment breaches) are flagged instantly. These exceptions immediately spawn tasks assigned to the responsible trust officers, with automated reminders to ensure timely resolution. Crucially, BITA REG-9 logs every action in an immutable audit trail, so examiners can easily trace who did what and when.
Automated reporting and governance are core strengths of the system. Upon completing each trust review, the platform generates a fully formatted Reg-9 review report and routes it through pre‑configured approval workflows. Each stakeholder (compliance officer, fiduciary manager, etc.) digitally signs off on the report, which is then automatically stored in the bank’s document repository. The result is an audit-ready file – no manual printing or filing risk – that satisfies regulators’ demands for documented oversight. Meanwhile, executive dashboards give boards and committees real‑time visibility into compliance status, exception trends, and remediation timelines, turning what was once a paper chore into strategic risk-management insight.
Ensuring Audit Trails and Governance
BITA REG-9 was built following extensive discussion with users and addresses each major pain point. By storing data and not having to start from scratch each year, and through automated data completion, it provides a reliable, modern workflow. By automating recurring reviews and checklists, it prevents missed deadlines and enforces consistency across all accounts. By capturing each review and exception digitally, it builds the complete audit trail that regulators demand. And by delivering executive metrics and formal documentation, the platform satisfies corporate governance standards. The result is stronger controls, greater efficiency, and enhanced regulatory confidence exactly what examiners in Delaware, South Dakota, or anywhere expect.
