I'm not very familiar with trust accounts, and it's not an area that we spend much time messing around with as we don't have a trust department, but we do have some accounts (wish we didn't). Management posed the following questions to me for "researching", so I'm doing my best to investigate what seem like relatively basic questions. I'd venture a guess they may be legal counsel type questions, but assistance or direction would be helpful.

1.) Is a personal trust treated more as a consumer or business account? Does it depend on if it's revocable or irrevocable/possesses its own TIN or uses one of the guarantor's SSN's?

2.) Husband and wife come in, they have a joint account and they want to convert ownership to their revocable family trust. Would husband and wife be considered authorized signers or joint owners from an account ownership perspective? Would this answer be any different for an irrevocable trust?

I feel like these questions should have been sorted out long ago, before opening trust accounts was ever considered...but they obviously weren't. Thanks for your assistance.

1) It's my sense that personal and family trust tend to be handled as personal account more often than business account. The exception would be a trust that is formed to operate a business. Whether the trust is ignored for taxation (thus using a trustor's SSN) or has its own EIN might influence the answer, but probably is a red herring.

2)The only signers on such an account are usually the trustees, who are often the trustors/settlors of the trust and may also be the beneficiaries.

This seems perfectly logical to me, thank you.

We're not doing customers a favor when we change ownership via file maintenance, particularly when the "new owner" is a trust. It creates a wonderful opportunity for a disgruntled heir to say the the funds were never "transferred" to the trust because bank accounts cannot be transferred from one person to another.

Close account A, open account B.

I actually commented back to their reply asking about why we would do that versus opening a new account, I'm not sure I'm looking forward to the answer!