A Chat with Stephen Moses, Founder at Zenplans: A New Digital Estate Planning Platform

Zenplans is a software company designed to help accountants, financial advisers and solicitors create digital estate plans for their clients.

We aim to solve the growing challenges that our paperless society and growing digital footprints are presenting for estate planning and probate.

Without appropriate pre-planning there is now a real risk that when someone loses capacity or passes away, that details of their assets and other vital information will become invisible or inaccessible to their executors, attorneys and beneficiaries.

We solve this problem with a user-friendly and highly secure platform that guides clients through organising their important personal and financial information in one secure place, with the option to grant select people with different levels of access at different points in time. These delegates can be granted restricted or full access, either immediately or after a particular time – for example, after death, or if the client becomes incapacitated – ensuring that information is quickly and easily accessible by the right people as and when needed.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?
 

One day my dad decided to show me his will, he wanted to make sure I knew where it was kept. We went through it together and it occurred to me that the will covered ‘The Who’ i.e. who the beneficiaries are and ‘The How’ i.e. how everything is to be shared amongst them. But it did not mention ‘The What’, it just referred to ‘the estate’.

Naturally, this got me thinking about what that includes and sparked a discussion between us around how I would know what exists – financial and beyond – and how to access the information needed to manage it all.

So, I started to think about creating a platform that would make it much easier for people to keep on top of all their important information during their lifetime, but also create a way for people to share all that key information securely with those closest to them to make estate administration easier.

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

For us specifically, the pandemic has brought estate planning right into the fore. Much of our lives have moved online, so our proposition is resonating very well with advisers and their clients.

More generally, our prospective clients are now really open to engaging with us over Zoom or Teams. Before the pandemic, meeting up with two prospects would take up most of the workday, now we can do this in an hour!

What can we hope to see from Zenplans in the future?

We want Zenplans to be the front runner in digital estate planning. We hope our product will be a must-have addition to the service that a client can expect to receive from their professional adviser.

For clients, Zenplans gives them the peace of mind that all their most important information is safe, secure and in one easily accessible place. For professionals, it offers an excellent planning tool, that not only helps them organise their clients’ information more easily, but also creates touchpoints, identifies any planning gaps and encourages engagement with the next generation, enabling them to turn a transactional relationship into a more advisory, lifetime connection, creating a closer bond with the client and their families.