By Legal Futures Associate Exizent [1]
Legal technology firm Exizent [2] has hit a number of significant milestones including signing its 50th customer and raising its staff numbers to over 35, just over a year after launching.
Glover Priest, a law firm operating across Birmingham, Staffordshire & Northamptonshire and North Wales-based Hughes Parry are the latest clients to sign up to Exizent’s revolutionary cloud-based bereavement platform, which enables users to capture all estate information, upload and securely store documents, personal details, assets and liabilities, generate and populate forms and run data searches to quickly populate missing information.
Exizent launched in September 2020 and is fast becoming the technology of choice amongst probate professionals. Early adopters of the platform include Friends Legal and Thorntons, while Trust Inheritance Group, who only signed up in May 2021, have adopted the technology quickly and already show very high levels of engagement.
As well as acquiring several high-profile clients, Exizent has secured a number of important partnership deals throughout the year. These include a collaboration with digital estate planning firm Arken.legal to link up the pre and post death journey for legal firms, running a pilot with Scottish Building Society to test a solution connecting legal services to Financial Institutions and most recently, Experian, to automate the asset discovery process. Thanks to the partnership with Experian, Exizent has been able to address a major challenge for legal service practitioners by making the process of identifying key banking assets and financial liabilities associated with an estate faster and more reliable, including those not necessarily known to relatives or family executors. Legal professionals and firms using the Exizent platform now have access to an Experian report with data about the deceased in minutes, a process that often takes a solicitor many weeks to complete.
Further product developments have included the automating of forms on the platform, allowing users to automatically produce fully or partially completed Court and Inheritance Tax forms using data from the case, make complex financial calculations, and reformat data. This reduces rekeying for users, mitigates the potential for error and greatly reduces the time taken to complete forms.
In another significant milestone, Exizent has seen team numbers reach 35 following the recruitment of two new marketing specialists. The appointments come just a few weeks after Exizent bolstered its senior team by bringing in Graeme Jones, ex-CEO at Scottish Financial Enterprise, as Senior Adviser to the Board. Graeme is the second senior hire for Exizent in less than a year – following former Deutsche Bank Global CIO and Nationwide Director Mitchel Lenson who joined as Non-Executive Director in December 2021.
Nick Cousins, Founder and CEO of Exizent, says the continued growth of the company, with new customers signing up every month, shows not only that the sector was crying out for innovation within probate and estate administration but also how important it is that Exizent continues to develop the platform and strengthen its links with financial institutions.
“Earlier this year, we conducted research amongst legal sector professionals and found that eight-in-ten think the bereavement process is ‘slow and inefficient’, more than half think they could handle probate more efficiently and more than two-in-five think easier access to data, better technology and software and better communication could all improve probate management.
“Therefore, each client that comes on board not only confirms our belief that the current probate process is not fit for purpose, but also, our trust in the power of platforms and their ability to connect people and perform repeatable tasks efficiently, quickly, securely and at scale.
“Our ultimate aim is to become an integral part of the bereavement journey. While we are pleased to have achieved so much already, we are only a year into our mission, and have huge ambitions for the continued development and improvement of the platform. Going into 2022, our key focus will be to develop our links to financial intuitions. We want to build on the success of our pilot with SBS and use our partnership with Experian to address the major challenge for legal service practitioners and accountants in identifying assets and financial liabilities associated with an estate, faster and more reliably – including those not necessarily known to relatives or family executors.
Cousins concludes: “We strongly believe that the probate industry shouldn’t be left behind in the fast-paced technology-driven world we all live in. It is this technology, combined with better access to data and information and a dedication to improving the industry that will continue to digitise it and make the bereavement process as easy as possible for all those involved.”