Many fintech companies pay lip service to the value of the human touch while actively working to eliminate as much of it as possible.
But that’s the gap EncorEstate Plans is looking to fill via its service and support of advisors providing estate planning for the first time and use of human experts on the back end.
“We consider ourselves 75% tech and 25% service,” said EncorEstate CEO Matt Morris. “A lot of advisors are new to estate planning, and we want to give them the support they need to feel comfortable.”
Morris and CTO Matt Pistone both played key roles in building Nitrogen (formerly Riskalyze; Pistone co-founded the company.) However, a different fintech, Holistiplan, inspired what they want EncorEstate to be in terms of service, support and an emphasis on customer satisfaction in the estate planning space. “Advisor satisfaction is our success metric,” said Morris. To reach this goal, they decided that at certain stages, particularly review, you need trusted human involvement.
“To do a high-quality service component, total automation has problems,” said Morris. “You can have the best doc templates and deliverables, but at the end of the day, you can't control what data the client is entering, and bad data in means bad data out. Otherwise, Legal Zoom would have fixed the estate planning problem 25 years ago.”
EncorEstate, like many in this space, works from a questionnaire. The advisor fills it out with an individual client, and scans in existing documents, and then the software spits out the necessary template documents.
Where EncorEstate differentiates itself is that the documents are reviewed by estate planning experts on the back end. The experts (many of whom, but not all, are attorneys) run through a 60-point checklist before approving the end document. Notably, this review is done less from a legal standpoint and more to clarify client decisions and ensure everything will work as filled out.
Alongside the documents, the advisor also gets a visual overview of the plan to share with the client and a custom “cheat sheet” for their own use, featuring some basic explanations of the current plan and some questions the advisor can raise with the client to ensure everything is accurate.
“Others use AI,” said Morris, “we use humans to review these documents and capture information to populate our one-pagers and overviews.”
According to Morris, the average document processing time is around five days—much slower than many competitors that can generate end documents in minutes. However, Morris claims this delay is a non-issue. “Very rarely do you encounter an estate plan where there’s a material difference between it being generated in a minute or a week,” he said. For situations where time is of the essence, the advisor can mark his documents as a rush (for an additional fee) and guarantee a 24-hour turnaround.
EncorEstate charges on an a la carte basis, with prices ranging from $150 to simply receive a one-page summary of a client’s pre-existing plan to $550 for a trust and the related services.
“Advisors sometimes feel subscriptioned to death,” said Morris. “Especially in a new category where they may want to dip their toes in first before jumping in.” He’s quick to point out that the service is high quality regardless of the volume of documents you’re generating—though heavy users will naturally get some attention and perks that one-offs may not.
They also notably offer deed services, whereby they’ll file the appropriate property deeds to ensure a client’s trust is properly funded (the price varies by state).
Account creation is free, though users must go through some mandatory training before being allowed to actually use the platform.
“Ninety five percent of the advisors we’re working with are either new to estate planning, or it’s not their core offering,” Morris said.
There are about 2,500 advisors on the platform, and they’ve generated just over 10,000 total estate plans, which, according to T3 research, puts them among the industry leaders.
That said, EncorEstate isn’t for everyone—by its own admission. Morris estimates that 75% to 80% of advisors’ books of business should work just fine with EncorEstate, but they actively disqualify any estates approaching the estate tax or featuring any elements that are complex and ripe for contestation—these are the purvey of estate planning attorneys.
“Simple estates are what we do,” said Morris. “We’re not afraid to say ‘when in doubt, refer it out.’”
Though many haven’t heard of EncorEstate, as opposed to the more high-profile platforms in the estate tech space, that’s largely because it doesn’t have any large integrations and isn’t doing any rounds of funding (a conscious choice made after being burned out on the venture capital world while at Riskalyze). Like Riskalyze, however, they’ve targeted smaller, individual firms to service and grow a loyal user base.
“We’re bootstrapped, growing by word of mouth,” said Morris.