Building a Governance SaaS for Trustees: Why Trust Administration Needs Software

Short summary

The author built TrustOffice, a governance SaaS for non-professional trustees managing ~$7.5 trillion in US trust assets. Key architectural decisions include enforcement at the point of action (blocking undocumented distributions rather than just reminding), AI-generated minutes tied to typed actions, and a Governance Health Score metric. The hardest part was domain modeling — trust law concepts like distributions, compensation tracking, and account separation don't map to generic SaaS patterns.

• •Built TrustOffice, a governance SaaS for non-professional trustees managing US trusts
• •Core insight: enforcement (blocking actions) beats reminders; AI works best when constrained to typed actions
• •Domain complexity was the real challenge — trust law concepts require custom data models, not generic SaaS patterns

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.