Benefit Trust was founded in 2002, when it was granted a trust charter by the Office of the State Bank Commissioner in the State of Kansas.

Benefit Trust provides a range of institutional trust and fiduciary services: collective investment trust (CIT) services, directed and institutional trustee services, custodial and safekeeping services, securities trading, portfolio unitization, investment management, and custom benefit plan solutions. It also offers nBalance, a proprietary fund-of-funds portfolio management platform.

Benefit Trust serves corporations and institutions, as well as banks, other trust companies, private businesses, and public entities. Our services support the sponsors, participants, and beneficiaries of qualified and non-qualified employee benefit plans.

A collective investment trust (CIT), also called a collective investment fund or commingled trust, is a pooled investment vehicle maintained by a bank or trust company. CITs are available only to eligible investors such as qualified retirement plans and certain government plans, and they are not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Because they operate under banking regulation rather than securities-fund regulation, CITs often carry lower administrative costs than comparable mutual funds.

The main differences between a collective investment trust and a mutual fund are eligibility and regulation. A mutual fund is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is available to the general public, while a collective investment trust is offered only to qualified retirement plans and similar institutional investors and is overseen by banking regulators instead. CITs are not publicly traded, do not have ticker symbols, and frequently have lower expense ratios, which is why they are widely used inside 401(k) and other employer-sponsored retirement plans.

Custodial services refer to the safekeeping of financial assets on behalf of their owner, along with related functions such as settling trades, collecting income, and maintaining records of holdings. A custodian holds the assets but does not own them. Benefit Trust provides custody and safekeeping services as part of its trust and fiduciary offering.

A trustee holds a benefit plan’s assets in trust and is responsible for their safekeeping and proper administration. A directed trustee acts on the instructions of another fiduciary, such as the plan sponsor or an investment manager, rather than making investment decisions itself, while a discretionary trustee has authority to make those decisions. Benefit Trust provides trustee services in both directed and institutional capacities for employee benefit plans and other trusts.

Portfolio unitization is the process of dividing a pooled portfolio into units of equal value so that multiple investors or plans can each hold a proportional interest in it. Each unit is assigned a value based on the portfolio’s net assets, similar to a share price, which lets participants buy in and redeem at a consistent, transparent valuation. Unitization is commonly used for collective investment trusts, model portfolios, and commingled funds, and it is one of Benefit Trust’s core services.

nBalance is Benefit Trust’s proprietary portfolio management platform. It is designed to manage fund-of-funds and multi-tier portfolios, supporting an unlimited number of tiers, asset combinations, currencies, and levels of granularity, and it automates rebalancing to reduce the manual spreadsheet work and human error involved in maintaining complex portfolios.

Yes. Benefit Trust Company is a state-chartered trust company supervised by the Office of the State Bank Commissioner in the State of Kansas.