A Scottish technology firm has raised £3.6 million of funding ahead of next month’s launch of a new platform to transform the way the legal and financial services industries deal with bereavement.
Glasgow-based Exizent, set up in 2018 by Nick Cousins and Aleks Tomczyk, has raised the money from financial technology company FNZ and other unnamed investors. Upon its roll-out to legal services firms in October, Exizent will join the FNZ OpenPlatform App Store.
The company was established following the personal experiences of its founders in dealing with the death of a loved one. Mr Cousins was formerly chief product owner of Barclays Wealth and Investments, while Mr Tomczyk was founder and chief executive of Edinburgh-based consultancy Arum.
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“Our personal experiences are what led us to establish Exizent,” Mr Cousins said. “We believe the administrative tasks facing families after the death of a loved one should be far easier, and that modern technology solutions and services can make this a reality.
“We have spent the last 18 months carefully designing, developing and testing our product with innovative partners, and look forward to launching the platform to legal services professionals later this year.”
The platform will begin by helping legal firms working on behalf of executors to efficiently manage the process of completing and submitting probate applications, known as “confirmation” in Scotland. It will also make the process of gathering information about an estate easier by connecting third parties to automatically discover assets the deceased may have had, reducing the reliance on an executor to find and send physical documents.
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Exizent also plans to build digital connections with the various institutions that hold data and information about the deceased to help deal with queries from executors and legal services firms more easily.
Adrian Durham of FNZ said: “The Exizent team has already achieved an enormous amount and we are proud to support their vision of leveraging technology to make the bereavement process far easier for everyone involved.”
The company employs 22 people, the majority of whom were hired during lockdown.
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