NEOBANKS: ACCOUNT SETTLEMENT
As Benjamin Franklin said, there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. There are plenty of digital solutions to help with the latter; why has financial technology taken so long to address the first? That same question occurred to the founders of Settld… In a year when the world mourned, frustration and distress caused by the financial admin surrounding a loved-one’s death was amplified. Never an easy process in the UK, the circumstances of the pandemic shone an uncomfortable light on the lack of standardised processes and the absence of digital technology for unravelling the affairs of the deceased. On average, each of us leaves behind 15 to 20 accounts – from those held with banks and insurers to utility companies and subscriptions we forgot we had. For too many people who go through the time-consuming and sometimes emotionally-fraught task of terminating or transferring them, delays caused by manual systems, insensitive communications and difficulty in contacting the right department, add to their grief. So much so, that more than 92,000 people have now signed an online petition calling for change – which could be achieved by using technology to help deliver a more compassionate, efficient response to the one event that none of us will escape. The petition to persuade government to introduce a Bereavement Standard for commercial services providers, making it easier to close the accounts of someone who has died, was started by mother and daughter Julie and Vicky Wilson in response to difficulties they faced in sorting out the affairs of Vicky’s grandmother, June, who died in 2019.
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“I couldn’t understand how it could be so inefficient,” says Vicky. “We just got cross – really cross.” But, while most people grit their teeth and battle the system, the Wilsons’ frustration was funnelled into a solution – Settld, a Cloud-based, automated end-of-life service that incorporates both a B2B and a B2C element because, as they discovered, probate lawyers and other bereavement service professionals don’t have a hotline to account providers. “We wanted to offer a free consumer dashboard because every family has to be supported,” says Vicky. “But probate professionals and local authorities (when they are responsible for someone’s affairs), face exactly the same problems. There is usually no better channel for them. “Some banks do have a portal, but most organisations have to write to an email address or pick up the phone, so it made sense for us to start Settld with a commercial focus.” The dashboard for lawyers and others has been running successfully over Settld’s platform since late 2020, with a consumer portal launched this year. The biggest challenge that needs to be addressed is interoperability, says Settld’s chief developer Pierre Martin, which is
why it’s developing a Bereavement API. “When we started talking to all the industry service providers (banks, insurers, utilities, etc), we quickly realised they were each operating in a vacuum, with their own tech stacks. From there, we started to identify lowest common denominators, cross-industry, so that service providers could adopt both a tool and a process standard that would allow organisations to communicate together in a unified fashion,” says Pierre. “Ideally, you want operations and exchanges between systems, unifying protocols and processes.” While that is still a work in progress, and not in the gift of any one solutions provider, Settld’s secure platform is already a big step towards solving a problem that affects hundreds of thousands of people a year. The platform employs Onfido document, identification and facial biometrics verification to address one of the key issues in account settlement: secure identification. It analyses the face on a government identity document, such as a
Banks know consumers are suffering and they know having a cross-industry solution makes a lot of sense
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