Have You Contemplated Your Mortality Today?

Welcome back to The Innovation Armory! Today’s piece is about how digitally native estate planning tools are dramatically lowering the costs and friction to will/trust creation and re-positioning estate planning as trendy and accessible for younger generations. Thank you to Cody Barbo, CEO & Founder of Trust & Will for sharing his perspectives for this piece. Trust & Will is building a Turbo Tax for Estate Planning and has raised $48 million from investors including Amex Ventures, UBS and more. Read on for more about:

• Trends amongst Gen Z that will drive future growth acceleration in will creation from a younger age including mortality anxiety, non-custodial asset growth and complexity of modern family structures / romantic relationships

• Why digital wills could become the next status / luxury good for younger generations akin to Balenciaga shoes or a Dyson vacuum

• How Trust & Will is revolutionizing the estate planning industry by building the “Turbo Tax of Will and Trust Creation”

• Why the government is incentivized to facilitate a transition towards digital will platforms to mitigate probate contestation costs and maximize IRS tax revenue

• The efficiency distinction between TAM expansion and pulling forward future TAM and how to apply that framework in the estate planning space

• How digital estate planning tools have the potential to catalyze significant growth in the broader will creation market

• The distinction between Generational Lifetime Value (GLTV) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) and why it matters

• How Trust & Will can establish leverage over traditional banks by using its asset and flow ledgers to help prevent depository churn

• The eventual Web3 opportunity to settle digital estates in real-time via smart contracts

• How digital estate planning tools can “play nice” with local law firms through white labelling and lead sharing initiatives

• How embedded non-profit giving marketplaces can diversify and expand the bequeathing gift / payments space

This is a long post so if your email gets clipped at the bottom, make sure to click unclip / visit The Innovation Armory to check out the full read.

If you liked this piece feel free to subscribe for future updates below:

Or share with the link below :)

From Trust Fund Baby to Gen Z Estate Architect

The estate planning process has historically been left to lawyers and the older adults. It’s a great financial model for attorneys because lawyers want to bill for as much time as possible to maximize their fee potential and elderly citizens have more than ample time available to spend with advisors to optimize their wills. Can you even tell whether this is a real advertisement for a local trust & estate law firm?

In all seriousness, while more basic will writing will cost you around $1,000+ in simpler formats, more complex wills can cost significantly more. There’s inherently a bias towards overpaying for wills and estate planning. First, people tend to be older when they write their wills and as a result more risk averse. For a document so financially significant to their families, there is often an assumption that higher fees means greater accuracy, tax efficiency on wealth transfers and service level. Second, by the time most individuals create wills they tend to have accrued a larger asset base and as a result are less price sensitive on fees relative to their underlying net worth. Lastly, even if a will is written on behalf of one individual, it impacts multiple other people in the broader family unit and network of that person. More expensive fees can feel more reasonable when expressed on the basis of the totality of individuals impacted.

Expensive fees, alongside a lack of perceived need, have historically been significant barriers to driving a higher penetration of will writing in younger adults, particularly amongst millennials and Gen Z. Increasingly though, there has been a rise in demand for younger generations to conduct estate planning. This shift happened during the pandemic and will writing levels have persisted at 8-9% higher levels amongst young adults since then:

Trust & Will has also done some interesting studies on generational estate planning across cohorts of ages. By their estimates, there are 45% and 39% gaps between Millennials and Gen Zers respectively in having any sort of estate planning vs. wanting to create an estate plan at this stage of life:

I see significant upside for this appreciation of estate planning in young adults to continue to grow materially over the next few decades. Historically, estate planning has struggled from a massive branding issue. Writing a will is associated with the end of life rather than a document correlated with prosperity, financial security and status that becomes a critical pillar of growth in one’s life journey. There are numerous examples of companies leveraging tactical rebranding initiatives to grow their total addressable market by expanding an initial use case up or down the age spectrum. In the toy space, in recent years, LEGO has been leaning in significantly into the “Kidult” segment, selling collectible LEGO sets to young adults and older adults. As a % of total toy sales in the UK, Spain, Germany and Italy these last few years, this older adult segment has gained nearly 5 percentage points on the backs of marketing campaigns to expand toy appeal across demographics. These campaigns reposition toys like LEGOs from juvenile playsets into decorative puzzles and collectibles with the potential to appreciate over time. Similar campaigns have been successful expanding in the other direction as well, like Sephora’s expansion of its facial cream and mask products to youths who view traditional anti-aging products through the lens of preventative health, social entertainmentand independence. 

Shifts in the technology, mediums and processes used to solve a legacy consumer problem not only generate substantial efficiency gains, but also have the potential to expand an addressable market through creating a blank canvas for generational rebranding opportunities. There will be a digitally native player in the estate planning space that capitalizes on convergent trends and tactical repositioning to grow today’s more limited use case through leaps and bounds beyond the confines and siloes of law practices and billable hours.

There are a number of secular tail winds creating an optimal environment for trust and will building to grow market share amongst young adults:

1. Mortality Anxiety - Ever since the covid-19 pandemic, numerous studies have indicated a spike in death anxiety particularly in younger individuals. Generalized anxiety rates are on the rise as well with nearly 50% of adults indicating they feel substantially more anxious than in prior years, with therapy and diagnosis rates higher amongst cohorts like youths with high social media usage. While there are multiple trigger points that can motivate someone to procure a will, fear of death definitely increases the practical necessity of estate planning. Whether the pandemic will have longitudinally persistent effects on increasing mortality fears remains to be seen. However, it’s clear today that the step function psychological change through covid-19 did have at least a short-term impact on will writing.

2. Generation Z Wealth Levels - Gen Z is better off than millennials and other generational counterparts at the same age historically. The below graph is normalized to 2019 prices to mute the impacts of inflation. Creator platforms like TikTok and instagram have opened up new wealth creation opportunities to Gen Z that were not available to prior generations from a younger age. Further, digitally native, low / no fee trading apps like Robinhood, Coinbase, etc. have unlocked new opportunities to build asset bases and net worth from a younger age. Higher starting income levels and greater access to investing opportunities creates an environment where youths cross asset level thresholds where they might consider writing a will even sooner.

1. Non-Custodial Asset Growth - cryptocurrency is the most commonly held asset class for Gen Z and younger generations. Much of this cryptocurrency is held in non-custodial wallets where there is no centralized linking of a specific individual’s identity with their ownership of tokens. Non-custodial options have remained popular for many after scandals at custodial exchanges like FTX and for reasons of privacy and data protection. When an individual dies without a will, you are designated “intestate” and a probate court will apply your state’s laws to decide how your assets are allocated to your partner, children and other dependents. To make this allocation, there needs to be a centralized record of all the assets that one actually holds. If someone holds the keys to their crypto non-custodially, the government and loved ones often have no idea that this ownership exists. This creates an asset transfer issue uniquely for non-custodial assets where they can be lost forever if crypto holders don’t proactively take charge of their transfer plan. This is not an uncommon issue within crypto as nearly 4 million bitcoins have been lost since inception of the coin. Younger generations with crypto are incentivized to build a will sooner to avoid permanent loss of their asset base if they unexpectedly pass. Unless tech bros want to take their crypto to the grave…

2. Complex Family Structures - 50% of young Americans believe that open relationships are acceptable and over 20%+ have reported experimenting with non-monogamy. Approximately 5% of Americans are in relationships that they would categorize as polyamorous. On top of these trends, divorce rates remain persistently high. 40% of new marriages involved a partner that has already been married before. Almost 50% of marriages end in divorce across the US. Between new partners, old partners, polyamorous partners, open partners, primary children and step children, the modern family of 2050 may look pretty interesting! Greater complexity in the landscape of dependents that any one person has, generates a greater need to build a will earlier to assure partners and children they are being taken care of. Both the complexity of and need for wills from a younger age will likely benefit from these trends. Here’s a look behind the scenes with a polyamorist couple amidst estate planning discussions:

1. Luxury Goods & Status Signaling - Gen Z spends a disproportionate amount of its income relative to other generations on luxury goods. Housing prices are so high that many younger generations feel disenfranchised and disgruntled and are more likely to engage in “Doom Spending” habits where they channel anger about the state of economics and politics into luxury spending as it is a way to appear wealthy without owning a substantially larger asset. BNPL solutions have unlocked greater access to these goods while minimizing upfront costs; further, the the influencer lifestyle surrounding social media has created immense social pressure to signal status to those around you as a means to stand out. Luxury goods for younger generations though are increasingly not only about signaling status, but also signaling one’s virtues. Gen Z is 68% more likely than other generations to discuss and share opinions on political, social and environmental issues they care about through social media. This appears to be both because Gen Z is more activist, but also because they signal activism and signal their morals online more than other generations. This impacts product decisions as 40% of millennials and Gen Z said that environmental and social issues were a massive factor in their purchase decisions. This might sound crazy, but I believe there is a significant opportunity to reposition will creation and early estate planning as a luxury good that signals status, wealth and virtuous behaviors amongst younger generations. Hear me out. Taking a step back, what is it that makes a strong luxury good?

Some common luxury goods of the day include Balenciaga designs and Dyson Vacuums. I’d argue that crafting a will is a bigger wealth signal than either since it indicates you both have the money to pay for the expensive will creation service and that you have a large enough asset base to merit having a will to begin with. More importantly, most material luxury goods do not signal strong relationships or strong morals. Creating a will tells your network, I have close family, loved ones, friends and dependents who adore me and I’m responsible and ethical enough to make sure that I’m taking care of them. It also says you’re popular enough and wealthy enough that you’re worried your wishes could be contested if your directive isn’t clear. These other material luxury goods do have a leg up with regards to scarcity factor and publicity. In reality, most material luxury goods don’t have real scarcity value, but rather artificial scarcity value. Through smart branding, there is an opportunity to create a perception of scarcity value even if the good is not truly scarce, similar to what Rolex has done with its entry level watch models and what Tesla has done for its entry level car makes. You can actually expand your market more sometimes by democratizing a luxury good while keeping its perceived status of being luxury. This works particularly well when you can leverage dynamic pricing or tiered pricing to maintain pricing discrimination, but drive up demand for a product across all price tiers. Given the differences in will types, asset bases, etc. this opportunity does exist within estate planning. From a publicity perspective, while you can’t display a will publicly, you can still talk about it publicly with those who you care most about conveying your status. This is why people purchase many luxury goods that they keep inside their home, where they are on display, but only to the community you want them on display for. This is also why there is a large market for luxury goods where the brand logo is not prominently displayed. People actually sometimes prefer the luxury to be more subtle, or hideable rather than blatantly flashy. Could wills oddly become the next Gen Z flex in the way seemingly erroneous objects like vacuums have become symbols of wealth and status in the status quo:

1. Culture of Financial Independence - Increasingly, younger generations are asserting financial independence from a younger age. Teen debit cards like Step / Greenlight, acclimate kids to finances from a younger age and a whole host of digital tools from budgeting apps to no fee trading apps encourage even those with more limited income to save and invest significantly. Gen Z is more financially educated than any other generation and channel their hustle and the plethora of finance educational tools available to assert their independence from their parents. There is a potential branding opportunity to tap into this rebellious financial spirit within Gen Z and brand will creation as a means to draw a line in the sand for one’s assets, financial future and freedom from parents and family. Creating a will should be next in line to asserting financial independence after getting a credit card and opening a bank account.

In The Digital Zombies Invading Your Afterlife, I talked about the rise of digital afterlife management and the rise of solutions to help with the transition of digital assets, passwords, social media accounts, etc. after death. According to Trust & Will’s Gen Z estate planning study, 56% of Gen Z doesn’t want families to have access to their emails, texts, social accounts and direct messages after death. Given how digitally sensitive this generation is, digital cleanup and afterlife management could be an interesting trojan horse through which providers could then sell traditional estate planning services. As I was writing this section, I couldn’t help but laugh at the common trope in the venture community of categorizing Gen Z as a messiah-like generation that seems to encompass basically any and all traits that could be used to justify an economic tailwind for a company in question. Gen Z is certainly unique, but it isn’t a singularity. Just your occasional reminder that…

The Turbo Tax of Estate Planning

On the backs of rising demand for estate planning amongst younger generations, there is a compelling opportunity to scale a digitally first solution that assists with will and trust building akin to the turbo tax of estate planning. Trust & Will, which has raised $48 million from Amex Ventures and UBS, amongst others, is a leading player in this space. Users can quickly assess via an online questionnaire whether they are best a candidate for a trust-based or will-based estate plan and then are guided through a series of bite-sized online questions related to their preferences around things like guardian nomination, gifting, handling of affairs, medical directives, asset allocations, inheritances, etc. Trust & Will also handles back-end workflows and processes related to storing key documents, shipping needed documents, state regulatory compliance and facilitates the process of notarizing. The business also offers adjacent services related to probate, which is when one’s will is challenged in court. The company has probate services and outsourced attorney support to help family members navigating the probate process. It also has a B2B version of the platform that it sells through financial advisors to help manage the estate planning process for wealthier clients:

Digitally native wills offer a number of benefits to customers relative to the average will that is procured through a local attorney. The primary functional downside is that there is less of an ability to capture what’s needed for more complex wills for high net worth individuals with complicated trust arrangements designed for maximum tax efficiency:

For those that aren’t as familiar with estate planning, risk of contestation in probate may seem like a relatively small point, but it’s incredibly significant to all stakeholders. In the US, all wills go to probate court, but the length and resources required in this probate process are far more significant if the will is actually contested. Regardless of contestation, wills need to go through probate so that creditor claims can be settled and for record keeping purposes. The best way to avoid probate court altogether is by using a trust structure. However, if one’s will is challenged in probate court, it can further delay the time until family and dependents receive assets they may need especially after a family member dies. The process can take 2 years or more and often cost north of 5% of the asset value of the estate in legal and administrative fees. Further, it creates risk that the final wishes of the deceased are not truly respected; part of the reason folks plan their estate to begin with is to avoid the bureaucracy and decisionmaking power of the courts to divide up their estate. It’s also really expensive for the government! There aren’t great public data sets on the number of contestations in probate cases nationally each year. However, in 2021, there were 152K probate cases filed in Florida. If you extract that on a population basis to the rest of the US that implies there are approximately 2.3 million probate cases per year. Contestations that drag out this probate process are costly to the government. They can take multiple years and are a strain on a court system that is already highly cluttered and clogged. Reducing their caseload by i) incentivizing more trust structures and ii) by shortening the length of probate cases by minimizing contestation frequency, would allow the court systems to shave administrative and judiciary costs and allow personnel to re-allocate their time to higher value cases. It’s not tough to get to billions of dollars in cost savings if you assume each one of these contestations “costs” the government a couple hundred dollars at a minimum. Not to mention the mental health benefit to judges… 🙃

Accordingly, the government actually has some pretty strong incentives to work with digital players to help transition to more trust structures and to mitigate the number of wills that are actually contested in probate as it could save them resources, capital and time. Not to mention, the IRS is worried about a massive potential for tax evasion on inter-generational wealth transfers tied to crypto, NFTs and digital assets. Working with a company like Trust & Will that incentivizes crypto owners to register their assets to avoid losing their crypto forever could be the difference between non-custodial crypto owners eventually just manually passing down their keys and evading taxes. This could mean billions in lost tax revenue for the IRS if they don’t get ahead of this problem now. 

So back to probate, how is digitally native will building better at reducing will contestations than the traditional estate planning process? Two of the primary reasons wills are contested are 1) Undue Influence and 2) Lack of testamentary capacity, effectively was an individual coerced or influenced into executing a will a certain way and were they aware of the consequences of filing their will? Here’s how a digitally native estate planning brand can help mitigate both of these prevalent probate contestation drivers:

Beyond the benefit to the government, the ROI on helping prevent a contested will petition in probate is strong for the will author and their intended dependants. Trust & Will has different pricing models, but their base pricing for a trust is $600 per couple and a basic will for a couple is $300. They also charge recurring subscription fees for the right to edit your will on an ongoing basis ($19 per year), but let’s focus on the core cost for now. Even at lower estate values, if their technology helps you avoid probate court illustratively 50% more than drafting by an attorney, that represents north of a 2x+ probability weighted return on your will investment alone!

The esta(k)es are even higher for a compounding TAM

Although digital estate planning tools are generally less expensive than attorney fees, they have the potential to catalyze even more market growth to compensate for this dilutive impact of pricing on market size. By moving down the generational spectrum and appealing to younger consumers, digital estate planning tools have the potential to significantly increase their total addressable market. The most obvious driver of this impact is by demographic expansion. At any one time, the current TAM is larger because your ideal customer profile is expanded from the middle aged and elderly to include younger cohorts. The interesting thing about age-based TAM expansion is that you aren’t quite growing the future value of your TAM, you are effectively pulling future TAM forward to the present day and making it serviceable sooner. I’d argue this is a much more efficient and achievable type of TAM expansion because the selling motion is: 

“Buy this thing now that you know you will need in 10-20 years.” vs. “Buy this thing that you don’t think you need at all.”

Beyond rebranding and appealing to Gen Z and younger generations, there are some interesting ways to pull TAM forward in this market by tying partnership and marketing initiatives to key trigger point life events. There are certain products that have a continuous decision curve, for example, buying a new T-shirt. On the margin, my willingness to buy a shirt online doesn’t vary that significantly from day-to-day regardless of ongoing life events. However, your willingness to plan your estate dramatically spikes in a step function manner tied to five primary types of events: marriage, financial windfall, having children, buying a house and a significant medical event:

Many consumers wait until trigger points later on in life to create a will, but there are highly emotional trigger points further down the curve that represent unique and persuasive selling opportunities to encourage estate planning from a younger age and at a high probability of conversion. These consumer decision points are step functions and so it is important to strike at the right time from a marketing perspective. Much of the business for traditional will creation is executed through inbound, e.g. someone coming to a decision on their own to seek out a law firm. Companies like Trust & Will have a unique opportunity to market through these life events and adjacent service/tech vendors to pull TAM forward by using creative partners. For marriage, what about partnering with Zola and the Knot to tie money funds from registries to will creation? For buying a house, companies could partner with mortgage lending and servicing companies. For financial windfall, there is a unique B2B opportunity to sell through financial advisors or as an add-on product to bank customers with savings deposits in excess of a certain amount. For adding dependents, how about partnering with pet insurance providers to help millennials / Gen Z designate pet guardians for their dogs / cats? Trust & Will’s millennial estate planning study saw a 12% YoY in millennial wanting to designate pet guardians in their wills. For serious medical event, what about partnering with healthcare providers around dictating important medical directives before elective surgeries, and using that as a wedge to expand into other estate planning components? Even selling as an add-on to life insurance on voluntary benefits brokerage platforms could be interesting here as it is a financial trigger point where one is also already contemplating their own mortality.

Further, if you can layer in a recurring revenue model like Trust & Will has in its recurring maintenance / editing fee, there are multiple other vectors of market size growth:

• Frequency of Life Events - The younger someone writes a will, the greater the chance they need to go back and pay additional fees to edit and account for complexities that pop up as their life evolves. For example, if you write your will at 40 and you buy a second house at 50, you will likely need to modify your estate plan. Further, if you divorce and remarry, the key dependants and stakeholders will need to be updated

• Longer Customer Lifetimes - The younger an individual writes a will, assuming you retain them, the longer you can collect recurring maintenance fees. Relative to other consumer businesses, this space should theoretically have pretty high structural retention as folks are unlikely to want to switch to another will provider once their document is fully baked and filed unless you have reason to believe your estate is at risk. The devil in the details is structuring the pricing model in a way that gets consumers comfortable paying editing fees after the initial will creation. I’d be curious how a fixed subscription model that prices at a much lower yearly amount (say $20-$30 per year), but accrues pretty meaningfully over the course of a lifetime would fare especially when framed as “benefit” like life insurance and distributed through corporates. Longer lifetime value is compounded by rapid advances in life extension where it may be feasible to see 70-80+ year customer lifetimes. Although conversely, some might consider life extension a reason why people may defer writing wills later into old age.

In the context of estate planning, I think it’s important to think about customer lifetime value (CLTV) through a slightly different lens that I will call Generational Lifetime Value (GLTV). GLTV is the $ value of a unit of potential customers that are linked through a number of factors including familial bond, exceptionally high referral probabilities and economic ties. CLTV thinks of one will writer as your primary customer, whereas GLTV looks at the family unit and future generations as one target buying unit. This reframing emphasizes the power of:

• Following the Asset Flow - What is unique about estate planning is that the churn (via someone’s death) of one customer actually creates a new selling opportunity down the line through the linked / extended family and dependant unit. Companies like Trust & Will know exactly who one’s assets are being distributed to and once those individuals receive a financial windfall, they will also likely be looking to create wills and trusts for themselves. When measuring churn for this sort of business, I think measuring dependant unit churn is more meaningful since following the asset flow represents an opportunity to continue the economic relationship even after a death. We are at a moment in time when this represents a particularly compelling opportunity given the aging of boomers is expected to represent the largest generational wealth transfer in history.

• Intra-Family and Generational Referral - Specifically in the context of local service providers like tax CPAs and family lawyers, these family referral rates can be incredibly high. How many folks do you know in high paying jobs in a tier 1 urban area who still use their parents’ CPA to file their taxes? Families are generationally very loyal to providers that relate to high risk and technically complicated services areas. Now this could pose a switching cost on the one hand, but I do think there is an opportunity to bottle up this local service loyalty and encapsulate it via a digital brand. Once one’s parents use Trust & Will, they are likely substantially more likely to use it since they will i) trust their parents’ decision on such an important financial matter and ii) will likely get exposure to the platform if they receive their parents’ assets down the line. Why are some service brands so strong they follow someone through their life from rural Idaho to the stitches on their Patagonia vests walking down Wall Street?

• Ecosystem Churn Reduction Power - Given its unique positioning at the intersection of finances, intergenerational transitions, asset ledgers and death, Trust & Will is in a very powerful position to help leading banks and financial brands prevent churn in their customer base at death. For higher value depository and wealth management service providers, one of the most significant $ drivers of attrition is death in larger, high net worth individual customers. For all estate planning done through its platform, Trust & Will has a record of all of someone’s assets, where they are held and which dependent will receive them after death. This data is incredibly helpful for wealth management firms to understand how i) their assets could leak out of their institutions post-mortem if they don’t re-engage with dependents and ii) what potential there is to upsell existing accounts by capturing freshly released asset flows. For example, let’s say one’s parents did their estate planning through Trust & Will and hold wealth management accounts with JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley. They die and they gift their house to child A who already has a home and doesn’t want a second. Via a partnership or B2B product offering, Trust & Will has the data and asset visibility to help JP Morgan: i) engage with the child early to retain their core wealth management accounts, ii) capture net new investing flows from the cash-out of the house and iii) steal market share from Morgan Stanley by creating incentives to consolidate investment holdings. This is a bit dystopian, but will we eventually see digital estate planning providers work with actuaries to predict a parent’s death in order to optimally time marketing initiatives to dependents before death? Jamie Dimon won’t want to look back after the massive baby boomer wealth transfer and ask himself: “where did all my accounts go?”

While probate court and regulatory hurdles prevent real-time estate settlements today, over a 10-20 year time horizon, we could see a world where digital estate planning players have not only the asset record, but also the account connectivity and embedded payments capabilities to instantly settle estates across assets, by distributing liquid funds and property titles to the appropriate dependents via smart contracts. Working with CPAs, ultimately I believe estate planning could become more passive via digital tools like Trust & Will that may become the cross-asset system of record that records possible asset, control and ownership changes across digital identities throughout ones’s life. Long-term, this vision would significantly reduce administrative headaches for will writers, shorten the asset disbursement cycle for dependents and create a more robust asset record that could help the government enhance total tax compliance.

Two Kinds of Non-Profit Partnerships (Kind of)

While many law firms have built nice practices on the backs of estate planning, it is actually one of the lower ranking practice areas in terms of average fee potential for local law firms. One study based on data from Salary.com and Law Crossing, indicated that it is ranked 9/12 in terms of most lucrative practice areas for local attornies behind employment, criminal defense and workers comp cases, amongst others. While some might assume digital will writing is bad for local law firms, there are actually some pretty interesting partner opportunities to improve the unit profitability for these practices:

Beyond law firms, financial advisors and tax advisors also represent very strong B2B channels. These individuals already hold significant sway over a consumer’s financial matters and are often viewed as key opinion leaders in their lives. As a result, these sorts of referrals have the potential to generate even higher conversion rates.

Beyond law firm profitability, another compelling partnership opportunity long-term is in the non-profit giving space. In 2022, in the US alone, over $45 billion was bequeathed to non-profits. For higher net worth individuals, there is no cap on the deduction amount of charitable bequeathment on reducing estate taxes, so there are strong taxes incentives for this amount to grow as boomers pass on their wealth. On the supply side, there is no marketplace today for non-profits to highlight their causes and solicit donations from individuals conducting their estate planning. This means that non-profits are missing out on a pretty significant business development opportunity. They are reliant on relationships with existing donors who also choose to bequeath in order to generate post-mortem donations. However, there are many individuals who may not choose to give during their lifetime for various reasons who may be more inclined to donate to a certain cause out of their estate. In the context of trends of increased social and environmental activism within Gen Z and Millenials, there appears to be an increased appetite over time across generations to make these sorts of post-mortem gifts. On the current bequeathing $ amount, assuming 1% monetization of payment volumes, this is a $450+ million market opportunity. However, as this bequeathing opportunity is broadened from HNWIs to average will writers, the market will grow even further.

Companies like Trust & Will ought to partner with non-profit payment processing and CRM players and lay the groundwork to build this marketplace to learn about causes, connect with non-profits and make pledges integrated directly in the workflows of their will / trust creation process. For the non-profit technology companies, this would help differentiate their CRM and payments offerings by helping drive net new payments / donation flow to clients that they onboard. Further, this would enable more efficient donation flow to non-profits and help them close a significant business development gap in their current donation programs:

All Innovation Armory publications and the views and opinions expressed at, or through, this site belong solely to the blog owner and his guests and do not represent those of people, employers, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in a professional or personal capacity. All liability with respect to the actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this site are hereby expressly disclaimed. These publications are the blog owners’ personal opinions and are not meant to be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.