All service providers should be required to accept digital death notifications to ease stress on bereaved families.
The Estate Registry, owners of award-winning bereavement notification services NotifyNOW and Settld, has this week called on the Financial Conduct Authority and the government to go much further in its plans to require firms to accept digital death verification.
In a recent letter to the Prime Minister, the Chief Executive of the FCA, Nikhil Rathi, suggests that firms could be required to accept electronic verification of death to speed up bereavement claims in insurance.
However, The Estate Registry, which runs two of the UK’s leading bereavement notification services, believes that if new digital service standards are to be introduced, the FCA should also mandate all firms to accept digital death notifications to ease the stress on bereaved families.
Currently service providers have a broad range of processes requiring bereaved next-of-kin and executors to provide different information and use different methods to notify multiple companies of a death.
Phil Hickson, Senior Vice President Global Partnerships at The Estate Registry, says: “We believe that all service providers – and not only those authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority – should have a similar and efficient digital process to allow bereaved families to contact multiple companies, in one go.
“While we welcome the FCA’s suggestion that verification of a death should be accepted by digital means, that’s only one part of the story. What people using our services tell us every day is that too many companies make it too difficult to simply inform them of a death, never mind verifying it for insurance purposes.
“We urge the FCA and the Prime Minister to introduce a UK-wide system of digital death notifications, so that services like Settld and NotifyNOW can help more people, more efficiently.”
As a service of Manchester-headquartered The Estate Registry, Settld along with sister service NotifyNOW is on a mission to build better bereavement services for those who have to navigate end-of-life admin.
In 2021 in a YouGov poll launched by Settld, more than four out of five people in Britain said they wanted utility companies, banks, mobile phone and other service providers to comply with new account closure rules to make life easier for families who have been bereaved.
Settld – along with Cruse Bereavement Care – has been leading a campaign to improve bereavement standards and more than more than 93,000 people supported the move on a Change.org petition.
Using Settld’s free service, members of the public can notify more than 1,400 companies of a death, but some service providers still insist that customers get in touch with them directly addding to the stress bereaved families suffer.
