Before founding Exizent, Aleks was the founder and chief executive of Arum, a credit management and lifecycle consultancy that worked with the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group, Accenture, Barclays and many others.
Ben and Aleks talk about business resilience, building a strong team and the intricacies of building a new technology platform in the bereavement space.
Watch the full conversation here.
Aleks, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Could you start by telling me a bit about Exizent and what you do?
Exizent is a company that started going about a year ago and the purpose is to make the process of bereavement easier for everyone going through that process. We spent a lot of 2019 figuring out what that really meant and the problems people experience at every stage of the process. It was driven by a personal experience that we, my co-founder Nick and I, had both had. That’s what started us and we spent a long time thinking about how we can best solve the challenges.
We started with aiming to help resolve post death administration of estates. We feel strongly that people should be focusing on grieving and not spending it on administration and paperwork that is time consuming and inefficient.
There are three main groups of people that we help: the first group is the people left behind, the family, the executors and the beneficiaries of the will. The second group is the people that help them, which is the solicitors, financial advisors and accountants that help sort that process out. The third group being the institutions that have information about that person.
We sit in the middle and the aim is to make the currently incredibly paper driven, time consuming and inefficient process faster, sleeker and easier than it currently is.
Why is it so much of a challenge to make this process easier and why hasn’t it been addressed before?
Why it hasn’t been properly addressed is probably due to inertia and it’s a difficult technology problem to solve that involves a lot of parties. As a nation in particular, we don’t like talking that much about death and we feel uncomfortable. People struggle to go beyond saying I’m sorry for your loss, how can I help? And those people that are not immediately involved move on and the very close family have a lot to deal with.
It’s a complicated process that needs a technological solution that hasn’t really been available for the last 5-10 years.
So your solution brings together all of these threads and leverages them. How does it work?
The first users of the platform are those that help people settle an estate and that’s your advisors and solicitors and other legal services. Typically time can be somewhere between 6-18 months or much, much longer in complicated cases. The idea is to bring it down and make their part of it much easier to do and make sure the process of communication and information gathering is seamless and easy as possible.
The second part of that conversation is the institutional group and because the platform is heavily API driven, it manages communication between all of the parties involved. That benefits everyone because a lot of organisations really want to do the best for their customers and they’re hampered in doing that because of the way they operate. We’re invested in, and will, make that process easier for everyone.
