How “abysmal” experience after grandmother’s death inspired North East bereavement tech start-up Settld

The ‘deathtech’ company, a term which Vicky said sounds a little more “glamorous” than end-of-life, is on a mission to combat the “hugely upsetting” experiences families face at a time when they are “incredibly vulnerable”.

“Our vision for Settld is to use technology for good and in a really sensitive way. Technology can take away some of that really painful and unnecessary stress which is often caused by lack of process and lack of automation,” she said.

“Dealing with grief, your brain is split into different states of mind. They call it the dizziness of death.

“As a customer, let’s say you are trying to comprehend that this person who you loved has just left your life then you’ve got the bloody gas company chasing you for a debt that doesn’t exist.”

“My god the horror stories that you hear,” she explained, from banks asking grieving relatives to present a death certificate in person at a branch to even asking for the person who has died to come to the phone.

“The industry itself, there never has been a standard and that’s what we’ve been campaigning for,” she said.

After the death of a loved one, relatives fill out a short form via the Settld platform and submit information about the individual, accounts they want to close and a death certificate.

Following an anti-fraud check to ensure there is no identity fraud or malice, the team at Settld take on the responsibility of informing the necessary organisations that a death has occured.

On the complexities of relative disputes, she explained how Settld steers away from this as it does not deal with the financial aspects of closing accounts.

The family or user will have access to a dashboard, which populates over time as the Settld team collects the information and notifies each company, which is left up to the family to settle financial matters.

The team at Settld then work to contact and liaise with up to 800 service providers, spanning across household, digital and financial services.

“We are the intermediary,” she said, adding that while the platform is free for users, service providers are charged a nominal fee as it “saves them operational costs”.

“We take away the difficulty of their customer care agents being sat in a call queue with distressed customers,” she said, alongside ensuring end-of-life administrative processes are adhered to.

Failing to deal with bereaved customers correctly can wind up becoming very costly for brands.

“The brand risk for those companies is obviously a lot higher because the bigger the company, the more people expect from the company because they’ve got the resources,” she said.

Pointing to recent cases, she mentioned how Barclays bank was fined £26m in 2020 by the Financial Conduct Authority, for failing to support its customers including dealing with bereaved relatives, and Santander was fined £32.8m in 2018 for serious failings in its probate and bereavement processes.

With Settld, the company aims to unravel the hurdles families experience and “ease the burden of going through the admin hoops and loops”.

“It is mainly back to this fact that there has been no standards. We have built for the first time this cross-industry engine, we have data that nobody else has,” she said. 

Campaigning for better industry standards and targeting Series A investment 

On the back of a petition that racked up 93,000 signatures with the help of Cruse Bereavement Support group, the UK’s largest bereavement charity, the team at Settld are campaigning to improve how companies deal with deaths.

This led to the company becoming a founding member of the Bereavement Standard Working Group, which is striving to push for a change and a cross-industry standard.

From the digitalisation of death certificates to campaigning for dedicated bereavement teams at various service providers, it “drove a lot of the insights” Settld was built around.

After being named as one of the winners of Tech Nation’s Rising Stars competition in the North East in 2021, an early-stage tech scaleup competition, she said it will help the company to “open additional doors”.

“There’s just so much more for us to do,” she said.

Following an initial government grant of £300,000, to raising £500,000 in seed funding last year from early stage investor SFC Capital, the company is eyeing a Series A investment raise this year.

She plans to extend Settd’s services beyond account closure by delving into uncovering hidden accounts such as ISAs and digital subscriptions, as well as “connecting people to the right services at the right time”.

On the future of the company and how she plans to evolve the platform to support bereaved families further, she has ambitious global goals.

“My background is scaling things internationally. Unfortunately death is something that we all encounter, it’s not a UK specific problem and so the cash is also there to help us start looking into how we take this beyond the UK and move into different markets,” she said.

“Now we have got that network and have got those relationships established, it becomes a nice dovetail to have the extension,” she said. 

Her ultimate vision with Settld is for the company to become a “household name”.

“I’d like to think we are an international organisation and would like to think we’re opening offices in various different territories across the globe.

“I think we really are helping families, which is why we started it. It’s all thanks to my grandma,” she said.