U.S. personal trusts hold $5–6T+ of assets, and trust administration is one of the last remaining corners of financial services that has not been re-platformed.^[2] Most trust departments still run on legacy accounting systems, PDF reporting, and manual reconciliations. Distributions are slow, reports are quarterly, and advisors get little real-time visibility into the trusts they're trying to coordinate around.^{[5] [6]}

At the household level, the experience suppresses adoption. Millions of families would benefit from trusts for tax, liability, and multi-generational planning, but opaque setup, slow administration, and fragmented stakeholders push them away. Advisors routinely recommend trusts and routinely struggle to get clients through the operational friction.

The fee pool that funds all of this is enormous. Trustee and admin fees commonly run 0.3%–1.0%+ of assets, with traditional fees of 0.5–1.5% and minimums — roughly $100K/yr on a $10M trust — pointing to both the value being captured today and the room for efficiency-priced disruption.^{[4] [20] [21]}

Wealth transfer at scale — and growing. Cerulli's 2022 projection was $84T in transfers through 2045. Its December 2024 revision raised that to $124T through 2048 — $105T flowing to heirs, with more than half of the total ($62T) coming from HNW and UHNW households that make up just 2% of all households.^{[3] [23]} The trust-intensive segment with the highest willingness to pay and the most acute operational pain keeps getting bigger.

Congress just rewrote the tax code in trusts' favor. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (signed July 4, 2025) raised the QSBS per-issuer exclusion cap from $10M to $15M, lifted the issuer gross-asset ceiling from $50M to $75M, and introduced tiered 50%/75%/100% exclusions at three-, four-, and five-year holds — expanding both who qualifies for Section 1202 planning and what each stacked trust is worth.^{[24] [25]} It also made the estate/gift/GST exemption permanent at $15M per person from January 1, 2026, which means effectively every estate plan drafted before mid-2025 needs review against the new numbers.^{[26] [34]}

Advisors are leaning in. Estate and trust capabilities have shifted from "nice to have" to table stakes for RIAs, with $144.6T of AUM across ~15.8K SEC-registered firms looking for modern trust infrastructure they can plug into.^{[14] [7] [10]}

AI in regulated finance is credible — but trust-gated. Morgan Stanley's advisor assistant and JPMorgan rolling AI to 60,000 employees set the bar for AI in high-stakes, audited financial workflows with human oversight.^{[11] [12]} Cerulli's 1Q 2026 advisor survey shows adoption concentrating in exactly Sava's territory — document review and meeting prep — while end clients remain skeptical of AI without a human fiduciary attached.^[33] That skepticism favors a regulated trustee that wraps AI in supervision and audit trails over a standalone copilot.

Document intelligence. Sava ingests trust instruments and extracts the provisions that matter — distribution standards, tax clauses, trustee powers, beneficiary rights — and maps them into structured rules the rest of the system can reason over.^[7]

Distribution and compliance. When a distribution request comes in, the system validates it against the instrument terms, applies tax, withholding, and KYC controls, and stages an auditable packet for rapid human sign-off — collapsing what is often a multi-week back-and-forth into a same-day decision with a full audit trail.^{[8] [6]}

Event-driven oversight. Background agents track recurring tasks (annual reviews, GST filings) and flag legal or policy changes that affect specific trusts — so the trustee can act in days, not at the next quarterly review.^[1]

Human-over-the-loop, by design. High-confidence automation handles the routine; expert review is required on critical steps. Every agent and human action is logged — for the regulator, for the advisor, for the family.^{[1] [8]}

U.S. personal trust assets sit at $5–6T+ today and remain structurally underserved.^[2] Trustee and admin fees commonly run 0.3%–1.0%+ of assets, with traditional charges of 0.5–1.5% and minimums implying roughly $100K/yr on a $10M trust — even at the midpoint, tens of billions in annual fee revenue.^{[4] [20] [21]}

The wealth-transfer overlay is what makes the timing acute. Cerulli now projects $124T of transfers through 2048 — up from $84T in its 2022 estimate — with $105T to heirs and $62T from HNW/UHNW households alone, driving both new trust formation and ongoing administration. Meanwhile, ~15.8K SEC-registered RIAs sitting on $144.6T of AUM are actively looking for modern trust operations to embed into their service stack.^{[3] [23] [14]}

The IRS data backstops the volume: millions of trust and estate returns (1041s) are filed each year. Even modest share penetration translates into substantial AUA and AUA-linked fees over time.^{[15] [13]}