Collective Investment Trusts (CITs)

A collective investment trust is a pooled, tax-exempt investment vehicle maintained by a bank or trust company that serves as trustee and fiduciary. It combines assets from eligible retirement plans to pursue stated investment objectives, similar in concept to a mutual fund, but built for the institutional retirement market and not sold or available to the general public.

CITs are overseen by state or federal banking regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for nationally chartered trustees, along with Internal Revenue Service rules and common law fiduciary duties. When a CIT holds assets from a plan governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), the trust is also subject to ERISA's fiduciary and prohibited-transaction standards, which courts have described as among the highest the law imposes.

Yes. Under U.S. Department of Labor Regulation 404a-5, participant-directed plans must disclose the same fee, performance, and investment information regardless of whether an option is a CIT, a mutual fund, or another vehicle. Fiduciaries and participants review objectives, expense ratios, and benchmarked performance through the same recordkeeper channels they use for any fund.

Yes. Independent data providers, including Morningstar, cover thousands of CITs using the same analytical methods applied to mutual funds. Registration on Nasdaq Fund Network adds a unique symbol for each CIT share class, making daily pricing and reference data easier to locate and follow.

CITs are limited for use in eligible retirement plans, such as 401(k) plans, many governmental plans, and the federal Thrift Savings Plan. They are generally not available to individual retail investors or IRAs. Reduced or eliminated investment minimums have widened access across plans of all sizes in recent years.

Fees vary by product, but industry research has found that CITs often carry lower average expenses than comparable mutual funds, a difference driven largely by the institutional market they serve. Morningstar reports the average actively managed mutual fund costs roughly three times more than the average actively managed CIT. Actual costs depend on the specific fund.

NFN assigns each registered CIT share class a unique, publicly searchable symbol and disseminates its price and reference data. That gives trust companies and asset managers broader visibility for their products, while also giving advisors, consultants, and participants a familiar way to find and follow CIT information.

Registered CITs can be searched by symbol on major financial data platforms such as Bloomberg.com, Nasdaq.com etc. Nasdaq Fund Network. For a CIT that is not yet registered, the plan's recordkeeper or the trustee that maintains the fund can provide fund fact sheets and related disclosures.