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 today 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 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, Settld – along with Cruse Bereavement Care – launched a campaign to improve bereavement standards which attracted more than 93,000 signatures on a change.org petition.
At the time more than four out of five people in Britain, backed the campaign in a YouGov poll.
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 adding to the stress bereaved families suffer.