Web service for a trying time

Financial adviser Steven Mait was making a left turn in his Coral Springs, Fla., neighborhood last year when a convicted drug offender, driving under the influence of cocaine, oxycodone, morphine and five other drugs slammed into his car and ended his life.

Financial adviser Steven Mait was making a left turn in his Coral Springs, Fla., neighborhood last year when a convicted drug offender, driving under the influence of cocaine, oxycodone, morphine and five other drugs slammed into his car and ended his life.

Understandably, the Mait family was shocked and numbed by their sudden and senseless loss.

In the midst of their grief, Steven Mait’s sons, Jarred, 29, and Adam, 31, had to locate and organize all their father’s insurance policies, investment and banking statements, and other financial information. The paper trail for some documents was easy to follow, while for others, it was non-existent.

Out of their experience of having to make sense of chaos at the worst possible time comes Knowtification Inc.

“We were shocked that in this digital age, no one had come up with an online service like the one we’ve developed,” said Jarred Mait, the company’s chief executive and a certified public accountant now enrolled in medical school. “Simply put, it’s a tool designed to help you locate financial assets owned by your loved ones.”

Readers might find sad irony in the fact that Steven Mait, despite his skill at organizing his clients’ financial affairs, was as guilty as anyone else of keeping only semi-organized records for himself. The idea behind knowtification.com was to tie up the all-too-common loose ends of most people’s financial lives.

Through the web service, a few important bits of information — a person’s full name, date of birth, date of death, Social Security number and last known address — are turned into a letter that is dispatched securely to the nation’s top 200 financial, securities and insurance institutions.

In creating the product, the brothers and their colleagues asked estate attorneys and other experts how to approach the problem of notification security. They also note that the site and service don’t provide data or account aggregation; after being notified, institutions that are contacted return all information directly to the customer.

As a first step, the service verifies a person’s information against the Death Master File maintained by the National Technical Information Service (part of the Department of Commerce). The file is created from data supplied by the Social Security Administration.

Knowtification.com then notifies credit bureaus of the person’s death in order to prevent identity theft or fraud.

“Our intention with this has been to help people who are grieving and not cause any additional stress or problems,” Mr. Mait said.

The service offers a basic plan that notifies 200 institutions, including all major life insurers and banking institutions, for a one-time fee of $59.95, and a premium plan at $89.95 that notifies 400 institutions, including 401(k) plan administrators and securities firms, in addition to insurance companies and banks.

BECOME A HERO

For the advisory business, this is one more tool that can turn an adviser into a hero in the eyes of a client or the client’s family. Given the availability of online tools in this area, there really is no excuse for an adviser not to provide guidance with end-of-life and legacy-planning issues.

After all, few professionals are better-equipped to offer help on such sensitive topics or are more knowledgeable about finding the right specialists.

Among the tools to help advisers in this area are Executorsresource .com and its EstateLogic offering, which is basically a secure online vault for clients to store important documents and personal information, including wills, birth certificates and the locations of safe-deposit boxes. Executor’s Resource Inc. charges $50 to $190 annually, depending on features and amount of storage desired.

Another site is Myestatemanager.com, from MyEstateManager LLC, which is oriented toward the general public but has lots of information that advisers or clients can use, as well as a partner network that advisers can join. It also offers a document vault — the Estate Digital Lockbox — and other services at a range of prices.

Rather than a simple tool, Planyourlegacy.com provides advisers with a legacy-planning practice-management curriculum. Its Breadcrumbs online software package assists advisers in guiding clients through the process of legacy planning. Plan Your Legacy LLC offers a subscription to the software for $250 per month.

While sites such as knowtification .com may become unnecessary when the offspring of Generations X and Y sign up for some superenhanced version of Mint.com or a yet-to-be-started competitor, the next decade or two should see plenty of demand from baby boomers seeking help with the assets of their parents, and then their own.

The numbers are certainly there: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2.4 million people die in the United States every year, and billions of dollars flow into government coffers as unclaimed assets. Advisers should be able to help their clients retrieve some of that money.

E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].