Blog: Trust Administration

Trust Administration:
Trust Administration: A Banker's Guide to Fiduciary Responsibilities7/28/2026

Fiduciary duty is the highest standard of care the law imposes on one party acting for another, and most training on the subject stops at listing the duties. The list is not the hard part. The hard part is that every duty resolves into specific administrative acts, and a trust department gets into trouble not by misunderstanding loyalty in the abstract but by making a distribution nobody documented.

This post connects the duties to the acts. Our companion post on

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Trust Administration:
CECL Implementation: Lessons Learned and Ongoing Compliance6/29/2026

CECL is no longer an implementation project. Every institution has adopted it, the transition relief has largely run its course, and the interesting question has shifted from "how do we build a model" to "can we defend the one we built."

That shift matters, because the findings examiners write now are different from the ones they wrote during adoption. Early criticism was about method and mechanics. Current criticism is overwhelmingly about support — for the ...

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Trust Administration:
Cannabis Banking in 2027: Federal and State Regulatory Landscape6/28/2026

Two things were unresolved at drafting and must be verified before publication: (1) the federal scheduling of marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act, which was the subject of an administrative rescheduling proceeding, and (2) federal cannabis banking legislation (introduced in successive Congresses as the SAFE and later SAFER Banking Act), which had not been enacted. Do not describe either as settled, and do not state that any ...

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Trust Administration:
FDIC Insurance Coverage: Rules Every Banker Should Know6/20/2026

Nearly every banker can state the coverage limit and comparatively few can explain the ownership categories, which is where the actual answer lives. A depositor with $900,000 at one institution may be fully insured or may be exposed by $650,000, and the difference is entirely how the accounts are titled.

The Basic Rule

The standard maximum deposit insurance amount is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership

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Trust Administration:
1099 Reporting for Banks: Interest, Dividends, and Miscellaneous Income6/19/2026

Information reporting is the compliance obligation banks are least likely to have anyone own. It sits between operations, deposit services, lending, and accounting, it happens once a year, and the penalties are assessed per form — which is what turns a systemic error into a large number.

The Forms a Bank Files

1099-INT — interest paid on deposit accounts. Reportable at $10 or more, and at any amount where backup withholding was applied. The highest-volume

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