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The largest financial transaction of your life is also your last – dying! Get it wrong and Boris gets more money for vanity bridges and your relatives are left with a mess on their hands and potentially plenty of squabbles. Get it right and it is smooth for them and you minimise being taxed twice on the same income.

Garrett.jpg">Garrett-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150">The whole death-related industry – wills, probate (executing wills) and cremations is super-undigitised (98% is still offline). It is into this gap that Dan Garrett co-founder and CEO of Farewill has stepped.

Farewill get 4.9* from >3,000 reviews on Trustpilot so must be doing wills well.

This is a super-important topic – if any of you out there don’t have a will you should get one and now it has been made digitally convenient there is no excuse. You can do it on your phone.

Topics discussed include:

• where is Haggerston
• construction projects East and West
• HS2 crazy cost (~10x the channel tunnel :-O)
• Dan’s career journey from manufacturing through engineering, design and Japan
• his experiences in Japan which led to founding Farewill
• his pre-work organising 15 funerals and getting a qualification in will writing and probate applications
• in OECD economies the death industry is an $80bn market but only 2% of it is online
• reasons being inter alia an avoidance of the topic of death until after the fact – this is the main design/brand challenge for Farewill
• smoothing the journey – cf moving pensions out of DB schemes
• Farewill have three products – wills, probate and cremations
• cremations are a nation-wide Farewill product vastly undercutting existing rates at £1k compared to an average price of £4,800
• cultural differences eg cf Eire
• “About 10% of the UK wants a non-traditional funeral but about 80% ends up with one”
• cremation product collects body, unattended cremation and then handing of ashes to the family for their own ceremony as they wish
• the importance of an inventory of assets
• the challenge of digital bank accounts et al – if you were run over by a bus tomorrow how would your relatives know eg that you had a Monzo account?
• the explosion of Fintech is only making this harder – every day there’s a new digital place to put your assets
• in the UK there is a vast £15bn of unclaimed assets
• customers really like Farewill’s addendum to their wills which is an inventory of assets as everyone wanders around slightly anxious in the background that no such list exists
• this is a big driver of their high net promoter score
• digital archives and challenges therein
• £90 to make a single will, £140 making a will for two people – it takes on average 12.5 minutes
• a team of specialists check the will within 24hrs and 40% of people get feedback/suggestions
• 20-somethings are very underrepresented, marriage, kids, buying a house, divorce tend to be triggering events
• the huge margins in funeral parlours and the impact of Private Equity players
• overall this has led to huge inflation in prices – doubled in ten years
• last year despite a CMA enquiry into the cost of funerals the price still increased by a further 9%!
• wills need to be signed with two witnesses and also exist as a paper version not just digitised

And much much more

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