Why families build one

Control and continuity: the trustee's judgment sits with a board the family constitutes, in an entity with perpetual succession, so a death or a departure never orphans the trusts. Privacy: administration happens inside the family's own institution rather than a bank's operations floor. Economics: the company's cost is the actual cost of operation rather than a percentage of assets under management. And capacity: one company can serve every trust the family creates, in the full statutory trustee capacities the chartering state grants.

What the states require

The family trust company acts, in states including South Dakota, Nevada, Wyoming, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Texas, and Florida, set the entry conditions: paid-in capital that remains the company's own equity, with statutory minimums beginning around two hundred thousand dollars and rising with the regulator's view of the business; fidelity bond and liability insurance; application or registration fees; an operating plan; and a scope limited to family and designated persons. The design work is what stands between those conditions and a functioning fiduciary, and a company that opens with clean governance and records keeps the posture that made it work.

The engagement, phase by phase

1. Feasibility and state selection. A memorandum answering the threshold questions for your family: licensed or exempt, in which state, at what capital line, with what annual carry, and whether the company should exist at all. The memorandum closes with a recommendation and the cost architecture of the recommended route.
2. Design and build. The entity and its governance drafted in full: the operating plan the statute requires, board and committee charters, the distribution-committee firewall IRS Notice 2008-63 requires so trust assets stay out of family members' gross estates, family and designated-persons scope limits, and the recordkeeping architecture an examiner asks for first. Filings move through the family's counsel where filing is counsel's work.
3. Registration or charter support. The application or registration package assembled to the chartering state's checklist, the paid-in capital attestation and pledge documentation prepared, and the company brought to examiner-ready condition before it takes its first trust.
4. Standing service. Where the family appoints it under the instruments and a written agreement, Corvus serves as the company's contracted compliance officer: the operating plan maintained, the committee calendar run, the records kept to examination standard, year over year.