Trends for the future of probate across regulation, technology adoption and access to data services from Exizent
As we look ahead to this new year, Aleks Tomczyk Managing Director of Exizent, shines light on Exizent’s plans and what he hopes to see from the industry, working together to improve the bereavement process for all of those involved.
2022 was another extraordinarily challenging year in which to establish and grow an early-stage business, as my co-founder Nick Cousins, CEO of Exizent, mentioned in his recent blog looking back on the triumphs and challenges Exizent faced in 2022.
In regard to the industry, we did see some good progress made in LawTech and FinTech adoption within the UK and as we look at 2023, that trend seems set to continue. This is important, to the benefit of users of legal and financial services as well as those working in the sectors. In fact, I would argue, that accelerating this progress is imperative.
2023 is going to be a key year for Exizent, as we continue on our journey to improve the experience of bereavement for all involved. By ‘all involved’ I mean three stakeholder groups: those that have lost someone; legal service professionals that help them; and the ‘institutions’ with information on the life, assets and liabilities of the deceased person. Exizent is of course a multi-sided platform with these three stakeholder groups at the heart of what we do.
Focusing on the growth of the legal services side of our platform, we have worked tirelessly to provide our users with a well-established and comprehensively functional platform, resulting in users and case numbers growing daily and accelerating – a trend we expect to continue this year. Our key product focus going forward will be engaging industry professionals to work with us to understand further improvements we can make, through our strong user feedback and our research community, then prioritising and delivering those improvements. This is likely to include adding more of the less commonly used IHT400 schedules (we already autocomplete the most common ones) saving even more time otherwise spent on data re-entry and form completion. We will also be looking at work management tools, integrations with widely used existing software tools and the seamless integration of more third-party data services – but, as with every feature we deliver, we will iterate led by what delivers best value for our users.
Our second key focus of the year will be the ‘institutional’ side of the platform, which will be used by those larger organisations with information on the assets and liabilities of the deceased person, for example banks, investment managers, life assurance providers. We are currently in the build and design stages of this, working collaboratively with a select few institutional brands that share our vision to improve the experience of the representatives of their deceased customers. This solution will enable them to dramatically improve communication with people that notify them of a customer’s death and act on behalf of an estate – including communication with legal services users.
As we’ve built our product and brand for the past few years, our focus has often been on Exizent and what we can build to improve the lives of our users. Whilst our service design led ethos makes this process outward looking it has been mostly product focused, this year we will be more engaged with the industry as a whole. I envisage Exizent engaging externally more in order to do this. Working with others in the ‘bereavement ecosystem’ we can collaborate on initiatives of wider benefit, particularly things that no one can do all on their own. For example influencing regulation, technology adoption in public services or access to data services related to the deceased. To help we are happy to share our knowledge and the intellectual property we have built up, if these can be of benefit to moving the industry forward, as this contributes towards our company purpose – improving the bereavement process for all.
If you wish to see how our platform can help probate /executry practitioners make significant time savings and improvements managing cases then please get in touch for a demo, today.
