How Trust Company of Oklahoma Brought Clarity to Estate Plan Reviews with Vanilla

The Challenge

Estate planning is central to what Trust Company of Oklahoma does, and reviewing estate documents with clients is a routine part of nearly every engagement. The process, though, was anything but routine.

Preparing for a single review meant reading through trust documents that could run 100 pages or more, identifying what was most relevant to the client, and building a PowerPoint from scratch.

“We were creating a PowerPoint, reading through the document, taking the time to highlight everything that we think is relevant, and then creating these PowerPoints with pretty ugly flowcharts,” one planning team member explains. “We’re not creative people.”

A basic review took at least six hours of prep time. Multiplied across the firm’s full client base, that added up to days of work, and still produced materials that didn’t always get the message across clearly.

The Solution

The team found Vanilla through a peer referral at a conference. After evaluating it alongside other options, accuracy rose above everything else.

“As a trust company, accuracy isn’t optional — we’re accountable to what’s in these documents. Vanilla flagged a misreading on our second plan, cited the exact language, and it was right. That’s the moment we knew we could trust it with our clients.”

Vanilla’s key observations feature reinforced that confidence, surfacing issues that would likely have been missed under a manual process: misspelled beneficiary names, missing corporate trustee successors, and provisions made obsolete by changes in tax law since the document was drafted.

Adoption spread quickly and organically, as the entire firm now uses Vanilla regularly. What started as a quiet experiment became the standard.

The Results

Estate plan reviews tripled.

Prep time for a basic review dropped from six hours to around 30 minutes. With that barrier gone, the volume of reviews the firm conducts has roughly tripled, not because demand changed, but because capacity finally caught up to it. “We kept it pretty small at first, weren’t really telling a lot of people about it,” the team member says. “The word got out. Now everybody on our team wants to run their clients’ documents through Vanilla.”

Clients finally understand their estate plans.

Estate plans are written in legal language, built around concepts clients rarely encounter outside of an attorney’s office. Talking through a plan, even with a well-prepared planner, only goes so far. The firm’s first client through Vanilla was a $35 million relationship that had come to them with a specific concern: they didn’t understand their own estate plan. At the end of that first meeting, the client’s response was direct. “This is the most impactful thing you’ve ever done for me. We love the investment piece, we love the planning piece — but we actually understand our estate plan now.”

“We had a client come to us and say they didn’t understand their estate plan. Two weeks later, they were our first Vanilla review. At the end of that meeting they told us it was the most impactful thing we’d ever done for them. That’s when we knew this was different.”

Vanilla Scenario Builder is changing planning conversations.

A second client, a $50–55 million relationship, came in confused about how assets would flow between their marital trust and credit shelter trust. Walking through the numbers in dollar terms revealed that the plan as written didn’t reflect their actual intent, a conversation that led to changes they wouldn’t have known to ask for. Three days after their review, that client’s son called the firm to schedule his own. “You can talk about where your assets go all you want,” the team member says. “But until you see the dollar amounts on paper, in a flow chart — that’s when it becomes real for the client.”

Disclosure: Trust Company of Oklahoma is a customer of Vanilla. This testimonial was provided by a representative of Trust Company of Oklahoma. No compensation was provided for this testimonial.