How BOK Financial Uses Vanilla to Review Trusts Faster and Keep Advisors at the Center

A Trust Review Process Built on Paper

BOK Financial’s Advisor Trust Services team occupies a specific place in the wealth management ecosystem. The team provides trust administration to advisors through an advisor-friendly model, handling the back-office work of administering trusts while the advisor remains front and center with clients and beneficiaries. Because the team focuses only on trust administration rather than investment management, advisors retain their assets under management and treat the team as an extension of their own practice.

Kimmel came to that role after years as a trust officer, where the work of reviewing trust documents was almost entirely manual.

“I was a trust officer for several years, and the process I came into was that I had to have everything printed off,” Kimmel says. “I’d have a legal pad next to me to take notes and highlight certain things in the trust. It was very time-consuming.”

Moving from handwritten notes to digital PDFs and highlights helped, but the fundamental work stayed slow. A full estate review could take two months and end in a PowerPoint that often had to be redrawn. As Kimmel points out, the underlying discipline has barely evolved.

“The trust world hasn’t changed in a few centuries,” he says. “For the most part, we’re doing the same thing that was being done in England years ago, when there were knights fighting for land.”

Why BOK Financial Chose Vanilla

Kimmel first encountered Vanilla at an industry conference, where a demonstration showed how the platform could streamline the document review that consumes so much of a trust officer’s day. What stood out was the opportunity to apply that intelligence to a newer use case. Vanilla had been built primarily for advisors on the front end and for creating estate documents. Administering a document that had already been drafted, on behalf of a trust company, was a fresh endeavor for both sides.

About a year ago, the two teams began building it out together.

Early in the partnership, the BOK team gave Vanilla direct feedback. The polished summaries were useful, but what the team really needed was its own set of questions answered, the same synoptic and trust document review it already ran every day. Vanilla’s engineering team moved quickly to build custom prompting that fit that exact workflow.

“Vanilla’s custom prompting has been our saving grace. It’s saved us so much time,” Kimmel says.

Just as important was how fast Vanilla could adapt. Kimmel had watched internal technology projects at a large bank sit on a list for months before anyone  ever saw a change.

Custom Prompting Inside a Secure Environment

Two things sealed the decision. The first was custom prompting that let the team shape Vanilla’s output around its own process rather than working inside a fixed template. A trust officer can run Vanilla’s standard summary, regenerate it with a custom prompt written from scratch, or layer new instructions on top of what Vanilla produced. Prompts can be saved and shared across the team, so one person can own a library of firm-standard prompts and distribute them to everyone else. For complex situations like a trust with multiple amendments, a dedicated prompt can walk through what each amendment did and which provisions currently apply.

The second was security. Because of the nature of the documents involved, BOK Financial ran a review that took close to a year before bringing Vanilla in, and the team developed its own AI governance policy along the way, at a time when few firms had one.

“We take security extremely seriously, and it’s nice to have a partner like Vanilla that helps protect what we’re doing while helping us streamline our process,” Kimmel says.

Vanilla met that bar in part because its models are trained by Vanilla’s in-house attorneys rather than on customer data. The platform pairs leading large language models with Vanilla’s own trust and estate planning intelligence, all productized and contained in a single environment organized by household. That environment supports uploaded balance sheets, custom labeled reports, and saved version history, so the next trust officer who picks up a file can see exactly what was sent to a client or saved internally, even from years earlier. That repository is what separates Vanilla from a general-purpose chatbot for this kind of work.

Keeping the Human in the Loop

For all the time it saves, Kimmel is clear about what the technology is not.

“You can’t have an AI trust officer,” he says, “and that’s not what we’re trying to do. We always have the human in the loop, and with the complexities of trust, we have to.”

Every trust is different, with its own beneficiaries, sub-trusts, and reasons for existing. Vanilla helps Kimmel verify what he is looking at, confirm which document applies to which beneficiary, and reference the exact article and section behind a summary. The decisions that require judgment stay with people. Discretionary distributions, the decision to accept a trust, and the interpretation of changing laws and documents all remain human work. On amendments in particular, Kimmel takes a trust-but-verify approach, checking that Vanilla captured every change correctly before relying on it.

Hours Back on Every Review

The clearest measure of Vanilla’s impact is time. On the initial review of a trust, Kimmel’s team is now saving roughly four hours on average, because they can find and verify information far faster than before.

One moment captured it for him. A trust officer had gone quiet all morning, buried in a single trust document. When she finally surfaced around lunch, Kimmel offered to run her question through Vanilla.

“She’d spent three hours looking for one specific provision she needed for a meeting. I ran it through Vanilla, asked it to cite the article, section, and page, and within a few seconds it was right there,” Kimmel says. “She was expecting to spend all day on that review, and instead she got her afternoon back.”

“Randy, this saved me so much time,” she told him, and he emailed the Vanilla team that same day to share what had happened.

The same speed shows up in live conversations. Kimmel has sat in meetings where a beneficiary asks a question and the room goes quiet for five or ten minutes while a trust officer flips through pages. With the document already loaded in Vanilla, he can type the question and point the beneficiary to the right provision on the spot, with the answer cited back to the document and, where relevant, to state statute or the tax code.

That capacity mattered most during the fourth quarter of 2025, a period Kimmel describes as hairy, with heavy onboarding volume stacking up around the holidays. Fast referencing and verification let the team move trusts through onboarding and acceptance without falling behind.

Protecting and Growing the Advisor Relationship

Because Kimmel sits between advisors and trust administration, he sees a risk that many advisors miss. He calls it the retention and attraction factor. Advisors work for years to earn a client relationship, but if a client has named a bank as successor trustee, those assets can leave the advisor’s platform the moment the client passes away.

He has watched it happen. One advisor had a client worth twenty million dollars pass away after years of working together, and those assets walked out the door. Another advisor caught a similar situation in time, after discovering that a drafting attorney had written a different corporate trustee into the document.

Kimmel’s message to advisors is to get involved earlier in the estate planning process, and Vanilla gives them a way to do it. The platform lets an advisor review a trust quickly, understand the key players, and identify successor trustees and trust protectors before an issue arises. BOK Financial and Vanilla are also working together on sample trust language that would let an advisor name a corporate trustee, along with their own firm as the investment manager, directly in the document, helping advisors keep assets and relationships on their platform across generations.

The Bottom Line

For BOK Financial’s Advisor Trust Services team, Vanilla delivers speed without giving up the judgment that trust work demands. It compresses hours of manual review into minutes, answers questions in real time in front of clients, and gives advisors a practical way to stay close to the families they serve.

“Vanilla is definitely a game changer when you’re looking to find efficiencies,” Kimmel says. “Where can you save a few hours? We’re saving about four hours on average in our initial review, because we’re finding information faster and verifying everything so much more quickly than what I was doing even last year.”

BOK Financial is a current client of Vanilla.