As you have identified, a corporate trustee has various benefits over the use of individual trustees. In addition to the obvious are those linked to FATCA, CRS and the requirement for legal entity identifiers (LEIs), where the circumstances of the individual trustee can complicate the trust’s registration, etc.
Unless the corporate trustee is within the regulated umbrella of the “parent” firm, it will need to register with HMRC as a trust and company services provider under the anti-money laundering regulations.
A corporate trustee within England & Wales can be either a simple trust company, or a trust corporation. Whilst there are minimum capital requirements for the latter, amongst its benefits is the ability to operate as a sole trustee.
Keith Wallace of Reed Smith (current President of TACT – The Association of Corporate Trustees) wrote a useful article on corporate trustees: http://www.tact.uk.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/tcchecklist.pdf
Paul Saunders