Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

The Planned Departure: B2B Feasibility Study

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PD B2B FS (The Planned Departure: B2B Feasibility Study)

Reporting period: 2015-12-01 to 2016-05-31

As part of the feasibility study for the project, we focussed on technical and commercial viability.

We spent a considerable amount of time in proving technical feasibility of the solution. Some of the key hypotheses we wanted to validate early on are scalability, availability, and security of the solution.

To ascertain the commercial viability for the Planned Departure, we were focussing on the outreach program within the legal and the insurance sector across the Europe. To determine the commercial sustainability of the program, we did time bound exercise and focussed on the legal, insurance, and the charity sector.

For the law firms, we started reaching out to the law companies with the private client division. We believed that when people are thinking about succession planning, and preparing wills, LPAs, etc., they would be able to appreciate the need for the succession planning of the digital assets as well.

We also approached Insurance sector because when people are in the right frame of mind; they would be able to appreciate the need for a product like Planned Departure. People buy insurance products when they are thinking about future and often thinking about what would happen in the future.

We also approached Charity sector, however, Our experience with the charity sector was not encouraging. Legacy fundraising for the charity sector is a very challenging problem. When we presented our idea to the right people from the charity sector, they saw the potential to get more insight on the donor’s behaviour and to nudge donor at the right time to leave the legacy for the cause they are supporting but didn’t commit to the trial.
Our primary objective of this project was to validate our hypothesis that there is a demand for the digital legacy product in the EU region. To validate this hypothesis, we focussed on following activities

- Identified events, online communities or places where we can meet people from the legal, insurance, and the charity sector.
- Presented possible solution to gauge their interest and learnt from the feedback.
- New feature development from the feedback we received.
- Learnt that direct consumer is willing to pay money for a product like this. Our conversion rate during this campaign was in-line with the industry standard of around 1-2%.
- Integrated our product with an external SRA approved company that specializes in the will writing services.

This project helped us in building a product that is appreciated by our partners as well as consumers.
Uptake for the product is slower than we expected. However, there is an excellent case study in place, and Planned Departure is successfully bundled with one of the insurance providers. This partnership proves our hypothesis that our product is a perfect package for the insurance sector.

We had many interesting discussions with the leading players from the insurance sector, and some of these discussions are still ongoing. We are hopeful that some of these talks will convert and bring millions of customers on our platform.

For a consumer, Planned Departure is a natural extension of traditional will and will sit well with other life and financial planning products. For an organisation, it is a perfect product that not only gives peace of mind to the consumer but also provides the right level of engagement.

With a product like Planned Departure, our aim is to ensure that information is never lost, locked or abused. In the UK alone, there are more than 25 billions of pounds of assets. These assets are locked in the financial systems in the form of unclaimed bank accounts, dividends, insurance policies, pensions and so on. With Planned Departure, our hope is to unlock this amount and ensure that assets are always transferred to the right people and are never locked, lost or abused.

We also believe that Planned Departure will have a very positive impact on the society. During our research, we came across many cases that highlight the problem because of the lack of access to the digital assets. Many families have gone through the emotional trauma and have fought with the organisations to get access to the digital legacy of their loved ones. With Planned Departure, we want to ensure that users are empowered to make the decisions associated with the digital legacy themselves.
Our partners