Introducing Empathy to Estate Bureaucracy

Many founders have exciting origin stories. As we look back on our first five years in operation at ClearEstate, I can’t help but feel proud of our challenging beginnings.

When a loved one dies, their appointed executor must first complete a couple of Canadian government forms containing 155 and 185 questions each; the Application for a Canada Pension Plan Death Benefit (ISP1200) and, if applicable, the Application for Survivor Benefits (ISP1300).

As I mourned my mother's passing, these forms became both a major distraction and, later, my inspiration. The Death Benefits form alone is intimidating enough, but the Survivor Benefits form is especially frustrating because it duplicates many of the same questions in a slightly different order.

Be prepared for many chicken-and-egg scenarios since executors must first qualify and be approved for the role before the real paperwork starts, which then only upon completion unlocks new sets of paperwork, some of which must be verified by professionals...

Once you’re done filling out forms, you’ll have to hire a lawyer. If you’re being diligent, you’ll want to meet with at least three to properly evaluate pricing and the services you’ll receive.

Once lawyers have done their small part, many will then need to hire an accountant, and repeat the same information, the same sad story, another three or so times. The process is archaic. You’re repeating yourself over and over, inputting information for the government that it already possesses.

As we often say at ClearEstate, and we have validated this with some market research, estate executors usually don’t know what they are in for, as many describe the process as among the most difficult administrative tasks they’ve ever experienced.

Some of this pain can be alleviated by diligent estate planning but, as I learned in 2019, having a valid will is only the tip of the iceberg.

Relationships Built on Trust

The constant duplication of tasks during estate settlement I found to be very telling of the whole process. These obstacles felt insensitive to anyone grieving, and then a number of shocking inefficiencies were gradually revealed over the course of nearly two years.

Estates are managed by a series of siloed professional relationships; these professionals may never share information or even communicate with one another, and there is no guarantee that the entity managing your estate will even exist at the time of settlement.

As I was navigating all of these professional relationships, it occurred to me that ultimately one organization would have to begin leveraging technology to streamline all of these tasks and the data that is required to complete them. How is it possible, I wondered, that no financial institution has created a service for executors and beneficiaries that offered some coherence.

This wasn’t a customer experience or journey like we speak of today in fintech, but more like a maze of entangled, suboptimal business relationships that few have even attempted to reorganize. Even 20-year-old bookkeeping technology could have improved the state of estate settlement in Canada, which even today remains a mostly manual process.

What was missing in the marketplace was a TurboTax for estates, I concluded. The first step toward efficiency was imagining the concept of one organization offering a clear path through planning and settlement, end-to-end, where client relationships are maintained for the lifespan of the estate.

It was surprising that up until 2020, no Canadian financial institution or professional services firm had made significant investments in estate tech. Quite the contrary at ClearEstate, as we continue to grow as an organization and add new features to our software, widening the knowledge gap between us and traditional competitors, while maintaining antiquated systems.

We’re not practicing lawyers, asset managers or bankers—we’re estate professionals building a new kind of institution devoted only to this one task: ensuring the client’s final wishes are carried out with efficiency and compassion.

Culture of Empathy

People have asked me over the years what it’s like to work in the “death business”. To us, day-to-day, our work isn’t as sad as some may imagine; quite the contrary.

There are professionals, like those managing funeral homes or cemeteries, who are surrounded by death around the clock. These jobs are physically and emotionally draining, and the workers carrying out this work have our sympathy and gratitude.

Our team’s role is more positive and less sad. In an ideal scenario, ClearEstate is designed to accompany families throughout the lifespan of an estate, even including executorship. The setup work is done far in advance, during better times, so that family members or other stakeholders can focus more on healing during tougher times.

The process can inevitably be a bit more difficult on families who haven’t planned their estates in advance, but we are here for them, too. Even using ClearEstate only as a settlement tool provides a level of support and transparency to executors and beneficiaries that simply does not exist elsewhere in North America.

From the very beginning, our CTO, Pascal Brisset and I were focused, perhaps to the point of obsession, on creating tiny moments of relief for families navigating our platform. Empathy has been a consistent value that our company culture is centred around because it has always been absent from the estate settlement process.

It’s a reminder we have to give new employees being onboarded: this isn’t your typical Direct-to-Consumer business, and patience is among our most prominent collective virtues. Many clients are in distress, I’ll remind trainees, or in the midst of feuds with family members, or trying to implement unconventional bequests…

Family dynamics can be strange, fraught with emotions, especially during estate settlements, and often difficult to reflect in a will. But ClearEstate is a good starting point.

The creation of such a platform seemed in 2019 to be inevitable, and the personal sacrifices our team has made to help my vision come to life has been humbling. This has been very difficult work, and accolades are few and far between. But as we approach the greatest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, ClearEstate continues to gain relevance with each passing year.

We’ll be helping exponentially more Canadians manage their estates in the coming years and despite the sometimes difficult content of our work, the team is laser-focused on bringing relief to families in distress as efficiently as possible.

One day, our platform will become so widely used that the Canadian government will be forced to take notice of its own inefficiencies, perhaps starting with the optimizing of both ISP1200 and ISP1300 forms. It will mark a small victory for me personally, but it is only the beginning for ClearEstate.