Essay
The Relationship the Statute Already Requires
Who at your institution has ever spoken to the person who inherits this account?
That question sounds like marketing. It is not. For anyone administering a trust, it is a compliance question with a statute attached, and most of the industry is answering it as though it were optional.
Writing in the ABA Banking Journal this morning, Mark Gibson makes an argument banks have needed to hear for a decade: the great wealth transfer is not a retention problem, it is a family relationship problem. Cerulli projects $124 trillion changing hands through 2048, of which roughly $105 trillion flows to heirs. Gibson’s central observation is blunt: if no proactive action is taken, the vast majority of inherited dollars move within months of a parent’s passing. Decades of relationship with the parents, and none at all with the children.
His prescription is sound: organize around families rather than accounts, bank the adult children early, host legacy conversations, teach financial stewardship. But it is framed as strategy. For a trust department, it is something stronger than that.
The rule: you already owe the remaindermen
North Carolina’s Uniform Trust Code does not treat the remainder beneficiary as a future customer. It treats them as a present claimant on the trustee’s attention.
Under N.C.G.S. 36C-1-103(15), a “qualified beneficiary” includes any living beneficiary who would be a distributee if the current income interests terminated, or if the trust terminated, on the date of determination. In the ordinary family trust, income to Mom for life and remainder to the children, those children are qualified beneficiaries today. Not at Mom’s death. Today.
And N.C.G.S. 36C-8-813 attaches a duty to that status. The trustee must respond to a qualified beneficiary’s reasonable request by providing a copy of the trust instrument, providing reasonably complete and accurate information as to the nature and amount of the trust property, and allowing reasonable inspection of the accounts and documents. Subsection (b)(2) offers the safe harbor most corporate trustees rely on: a report sent at least annually and at termination, describing the property, liabilities, receipts, disbursements, the source and amount of the trustee’s compensation, and the assets at market value.
Translate that for a family. The law already contemplates that the children know the trustee, know what the trust holds, and know what the trustee is being paid. The statute assumes a relationship. It just does not describe it in the language of business development.
So when a bank says it has no relationship with the heirs, it is describing a gap that the trust code already told it to close, in North Carolina and in materially similar form in Delaware, South Dakota and Tennessee.
What annual reporting is not
Here is the uncomfortable part. Satisfying 36C-8-813 is not the same thing as knowing a family.
A statement mailed once a year to an address on file discharges the duty and builds nothing. It is a legally sufficient monologue. The beneficiary who receives it learns the market value of the assets and the amount of the trustee’s fee, and learns almost nothing about why the trust exists, what the settlor intended it to accomplish, or who to call when a decision has to be made.
That is exactly the beneficiary who liquidates within ninety days of the funeral. Not out of disloyalty. Out of unfamiliarity. Nobody moves their money away from a person they trust; they move it away from an institution they have only ever met on paper.
Gibson’s data point and the statute point at the same failure from opposite directions. He measures it in assets lost. The trust code measures it in a duty discharged at the floor rather than the ceiling.
The honest counterargument
The fair objection is that a trustee is not the family’s relationship manager, and that a duty to inform is deliberately narrower than a duty to befriend. That is right, and it matters. Section 36C-8-813(b)(1) expressly says the trustee need not inform beneficiaries in advance of transactions, and subsection (c) lets a qualified beneficiary waive reports entirely. The drafters were guarding against a trustee who administers by committee, or who lets a remainderman with an economic interest in a smaller distribution pressure the trustee’s discretion. There are families where more contact with the children would compromise the trustee’s independence, not strengthen it, and a trust officer who treats every heir as a prospect will eventually let a business goal color a fiduciary judgment. That risk is real.
But the statute already drew that line, and it drew it well past where most institutions are standing. Providing the instrument, the holdings, and an accounting on reasonable request is not advocacy for the remaindermen. It is the minimum the beneficiary is owed, and the industry is treating it like a ceiling.
The fiduciary read
The reframe worth taking from Gibson’s piece is that the wealth transfer is not a race to hold assets. It is a test of whether the promise made to a settlor survives the settlor.
A trust is a promise kept to someone who will not be present to enforce it. The person who inherits the benefit of that promise is the one who has to be able to see it, to know why the structure was built, what it was meant to protect, and who is accountable for it. That is not sentiment. It is the substance of accountability that 36C-8-813 exists to enforce, and it is the reason the duty runs to remaindermen who cannot touch a dollar today.
I learned this in a different uniform. Handing off responsibility means the person who takes it can carry it without you standing there. If the successor does not know what they have been given, the handoff did not happen; a signature just moved.
Banks that win the next twenty years will not win because they built a family banking package. They will win because the children already knew who to call, and had known for years. The statute told them to make that call possible. The $124 trillion is just the price of having read it narrowly.
Source: How banks can garner their share of the wealth transfer windfall (ABA Banking Journal, August 3, 2026), with wealth transfer projections from Cerulli Associates. Statutory text from the North Carolina General Assembly. Educational only. Not legal, tax, or investment advice.