Towards Better Ends
People, and the organisations they rely upon for services, are bad at anticipating, preparing for, and easing, the repercussions of the most inevitable of life events: death.
This article explains a few of the services available in Australia, suggests how we might be able to make this most difficult of times a little easier, and proposes how we might provide better support in the future.
Why is this hard?
We (myself included) prefer not to think about death. A cocktail of cultural taboos, perceived bad taste and social stigma make the topic difficult to discuss for many. We would rather focus our energy on living a ‘good life’ than consider that, no matter how “good” our life is, it will end, and we should make our passing easier for those that survive us.
Most organisations too are ill prepared. Business models are built on the acquisition and servicing of living customer’s needs. Only the specialist few focus on the administration of death. However, it is inevitable that people will die every year. And all adult people who die are customers of organisations.
This means that all organisations should expect, and be prepared for, the demise of some of their customers every year.
Why is this difficult for organisations? One problem for most organisations is that the efficient, effective and empathetic handling of death is not a “line of business”. It is not a product or profit centre. It is not something that most organisations can (or should) make money from, but it is certainly something that, if poorly handled, can harm surviving people, and damage the relationship and reputation that an organisation has with society. It would be a rare organisation that put its rising stars to the task of making sure it handled death better, although that might do some good in reinforcing the need for ethics and empathy amongst future leaders.
This is particularly true for those organisations founded as digital companies. The race for growth rarely allowed any consideration for customer exits, of any kind. Fast growing companies made it easy to join their platform, and hard to leave. In its origins, Facebook built software to help people migrate from other platforms, and now makes it illegal to do the same to move away. Broadly speaking, “off-boarding”, providing an easy path for customers, or their survivors, to exit their accounts with whatever data is theirs to keep, is a significantly underdeveloped area for most companies.
Another challenge for most organisations is that the process is relatively rarely executed. The more seldom a process is executed, the less easy it is to identify patterns of problems and opportunities for improvement.
We might summarise these challenges in four broad areas:
- Poorly prepared people. The deceased and those that survive them are rarely well prepared for death.
- Emotionally charged environments and difficult decision making. Grief affects our ability to make decisions and to take action. It makes our emotions raw and hard to manage. Death administration is far from simple, the decisions can be difficult and have high impact, and grieving survivors may not be able to understand or process what is required of them.
- Poorly prepared organisations. Organisations can be unprepared and/or may not have invested significant effort in designing their processes to handle an event that typically represents cost and risk. Death can also be mis-reported and organisations need to be aware of the risk of fraud.
- The increasing complexity of our everyday lives. Those of us living in the developed world have a bewilderingly large number of choices of things to subscribe to, accounts to create and services to purchase. Keeping track of all of these, remembering to close down and disconnect those we don’t use, is difficult enough when we’re alive, and impossible when we’re dead.
A few years ago, the role of the executor might have been simply to go through the financial records of the direct debits of the deceased, and make sure those organisations were contacted. If no payments were being made, it wasn’t important. Now organisations and people have a mutually increasing reliance on digital interactions and complex contracts and accounts, and this has compounded issues, adding layers of complexity and challenge.
The principle challenge is that online systems are designed with the expectation that when someone “onboards” and proves “who” they are when creating an account, it is they (and always will be they) who will be accessing the account in the future.
The “identification and authentication” process of every Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) product governing access to online systems is designed to ensure this precise point: they are designed for the living, not for their demise.
Here death is a clear example of a situation where a strong “Digital Identity” has next to no use. It matters profoundly “who” the deceased is, but they are no longer able to answer for themselves and can no longer “prove” their identity online. Rather the person granted responsibility to manage their estate must “introduce” themselves to the organisations that the deceased used, and convince them that the person has died, and that they, a person potentially unknown to the organisation, are responsible for managing the deceased’s affairs.
This is a point we have made often at Sezoo about digital trust transactions: in almost all cases it doesn’t matter who we are, it does matter what rights and duties we have.
The administrative systems of developed countries (including Australia) have established ways in which the survivor of the deceased can prove that someone has died (a death certificate), and that they have rights and duties over the deceased’s estate (executor of the Will or a Grant of Probate).
Most of these systems have remained the same for decades if not hundreds of years, and are designed for a world where people can present themselves and their papers to people who may know them at the offices of organisations used by the deceased.
A model that is increasingly irrelevant.
Jackie and Joe’s story
We’ll use a simple story to explain all of this. Our aim is to make it clear why it can be difficult for survivors to notify all organisations used by the deceased, and why organisations can face challenges in responding appropriately. We’ll keep the story reasonably high-level and standard, for Australia at least.
After the story, we will highlight how existing services can be used by individuals and organisations to make death administration easier, and how those systems can themselves be improved through increased use.
Finally we’ll also look at how we can use emerging technology to make it easier for survivors to provide proof of their rights and duties to the deceased.
Our story will talk about Jackie who led a full life during which they engaged with many people, organisations and services. Jackie and Joe lived together and Jackie handled many of the household bills and accounts.
When Jackie passes, the cause of their death is noted by a doctor in a “Medical Certificate Cause of Death”, and their death is notified to the local State or Territory Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages (RBDM) by the Funeral Director that Joe has chosen, on behalf of Joe. This is a “Death Registration Statement”. The funeral director also orders a Death Certificate on behalf of Joe.
Jackie had prepared a Will before they died. The legal system recognises that Jackie’s Will is valid, and that it names Joe as the executor. This, combined with the Death Certificate, results in a “Grant of Probate” being issued to Joe to provide legal proof that they are the executor of Jackie’s estate.
What do organisations know?
One of the key collaborations is that all death data is coordinated through the Australian Coordinating Registry (ACR), a service currently operated by the Queensland RBDM, to ensure integrity and national access.
In Australia, each State and Territory has its own RBDM. These independent government organisations have managed the cardinal records of civil life in Australia for over 150 years. Collaborating on many levels, and backed by the data and digital ministers of each state and territory, in the last few years the RBDMs have established services to provide support to people and organisations when someone dies.
This data is then used to provide three national services:
- Fact of Death (FoD): A compilation of national death data available to government organisations
- Australian Death Check (ADC): The only official source of death data and services available to commercial organisations. As well as confirming that the data on a death certificate matches a death record, the ADC can provide a data cleanse service by checking customer information against death records dating back to 1992.
- Australian Death Notification Service: Coordinated by the NSW RBDM, the ADNS is a national service that allows people to notify participating organisations of the death of someone. The service is voluntary for people to use, and organisations can choose to participate or not (hence not all organisations have subscribed).
In addition, the ACR provides services such as the Cause of Death Unit Record File, anonymised data used for health and medical research.
What Joe has to do
Joe is grieving but is to some extent lucky, Jackie left a valid Will and Joe has the key documents that the law requires. Armed with the Death Certificate and Grant of Probate, Joe attempts to notify all organisations of the passing of Jackie and to provide instructions on what they want to be done next.
This still isn’t easy, Jackie’s Will is a significant help, but each organisation that Joe contacts has a different process, different requirements, and different reaction to Joe’s attempts to complete the closure of Jackie’s account(s). Most of the organisations Joe contacted demanded original documents (Joe needs more than 12 death certificates in the end), “certified copies” of identity documents, some required copies of the Will, and Joe’s Grant of Probate.
Joe managed to notify a number, but not all organisations, through the ADNS. This made the initial contact easier, even if each still required a one by one handling process since the specifics of the account and the instructions from each organisation had unique qualities.
Joe didn’t know all the organisation and accounts that Jackie had established. The details of financial assets were described in Jackie’s Will (such as life insurance, superannuation, health insurance, bank accounts, credit cards etc.), but the number of subscription services and other contracts that Jackie had entered into (knowingly and unknowingly) was a real surprise to Joe. Banks can be a help too, depending on the banking system. Some banking systems provide “mandate management”, which gives the banks visibility of direct debit relationships, and hence the ability to provide better support. Australia’s newly introduced “PayTo” should provide some support here.
Even having found which organisations to contact, Joe was faced with challenges. Deciding what to do with the account and the data when closing it was another set of difficult decisions. Some companies offered specific services for “memorialised” accounts, others offered downloads or deletion. Still others hadn’t worked out what they should do.
Time and time again, Joe found themself having to (re)prove that Jackie was dead, prove who they are, and that they were the legal executor of Jackie’s will.
It took years before all the loose ends were tied up.
Making the most of what we’ve got
The Australian Death Check (ADC) and Australian Death Notification Service (ADNS) provide genuinely useful existing services for Australian commercial organisations and the people trying to manage the process of death administration. More should be made of them.
Specifically, organisations should:
- Subscribe to the ADC services to check their customer information against accurate death records so that they can identify customers who are a potential match (note that care needs to be taken with any apparent match since there is room for false positives as well as false negatives).
- Subscribe to the ADNS so that they might receive direct notifications from people about the death of a customer.
- Give more consideration to the processes, people and approach that they take in handling the death of a customer and dealing with the survivor(s). These processes demand as much care and attention as the most valuable (financially rewarding) customer/product lines.
This isn’t just about organisations though. To the extent we are able, we should look after ourselves too. People should:
- Plan for what is inevitable and to make that easier for those that survive us. An up to date Will should mean that all important financial assets and institutional details are listed.
- For those myriad other online accounts, some third party password managers provide a method by which you can ensure access to your password vault is given to a specific named family member on their request (and you don’t deny the request within a time period). [Note that giving access to your account to another person makes it possible for them to access your account, it doesn’t make it clear to the organisation that they have that right and, to all intents and purposes, the organisation may believe that the deceased is still active.] Further, the systems we access, the accounts we have, and the passwords and second factors we use all change frequently. While we might imagine that keeping a printed list in a secure place will work, it would need frequent updates and for most of us printing it once is once too many.
- Make use of the ADNS (and services like it, such as the “Advice of Death Form”) to make the administration of a deceased person easier to manage.
Towards a better future
There are some improvements that we hope will deliver improved use and capability of the systems we have.
Awareness of the available services should be increased. Advertising death services may not win many votes, but it is an essential service. Existing service providers, such as funeral directors, could also suggest the use of the services for their customers if they don’t do so already.
The Australian Death Check (ADC) could be made use of by all organisations with sizable customer numbers of customers both to check their customer lists and to inform them of potential matches.
The Australian Death Notification Service gives better results with more use: when more organisations subscribe and more people use the services. The two are positively linked:
- The more organisations subscribe the better the chance that an individual will find the organisations they need to notify of someone’s death
- The more people use the service, the greater proportion of notifications that subscribing companies receive about a customer’s death through the service
Also note that the ADNS provides a method to notify organisations of a death, and who to contact. The Death Certificate can be checked, but the organisation will still need to confirm that the person with rights to manage the estate is notifying them. The specific rights and duties of the survivor, the wishes of the deceased, and the rules and regulations under which the organisation operates will still need to be aligned.
All organisations should spend time focusing on how they process the inevitable demise of some of their customers. This is particularly true for new, digitally native, organisations. Attention should be given to how efficient, effective and most importantly, how empathetic they are in the handling of this inevitable “use case”.
Digital Services need Verifiable Digital Artefacts
We referenced earlier in this article that the existing processes rely upon physical documents, which then need “certified copies” to be created with the help of an authorised person, and/or originals scanned or presented, uploaded or sent, and then verified by the receiving party. None of this makes death administration easier.
A far better model for online and in person use is to provide these documents as “Verifiable Certificates”, where the document authenticity (who issued it) can be proven as well as the document integrity (that it hasn’t been changed). This approach will work well for Death Certificates as they currently stand. With these the holder would be able to provide proof to whoever they need, whenever they need and as often as they need without having the time and cost of getting additional certificates and/or a third party to certify copies of physical certificates.
A legal authority could also record the rights and duties of the executor of the Will as a Verifiable Credential. Perhaps even more powerfully, such “grant” documents can be strongly digitally bound to their holder such that they, and only they, can present them as a verifiable proof of their role towards the deceased.
Further still, we may need a way to capture all the business and organisational relationships we establish over time, so that we can more easily manage these when living, and provide a verifiable record for those that are responsible for closing our affairs when we die. This would demand consistency in account creation and confirmation back to the customer, regulations and standards even, and that seems a long way away at present.
Closing thoughts
The estates of dead people are too often fought over and defrauded by people and organisations. An ageing population that is asset rich, and an increasing entanglement with digital products, mean that this will only get worse. The dead can’t speak for themselves, nor can they complain of injustice. They make an all too easy target for fraud and misrepresentation.
They, and we, deserve better service and better protection.
Sources
Financial Institutions and their requirements (example from a law firm)
Australian Death Check: https://www.australiandeathcheck.gov.au/
Australian Death Notification Service: https://deathnotification.gov.au/
Australian Coordinating Registrar (ACR) – National death services: https://www.qld.gov.au/law/births-deaths-marriages-and-divorces/data/national-data
Services Australia – Who to tell when someone dies: https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/who-to-tell-when-someone-dies?context=60101
Services Australia – Advice of Death form:
https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/sa116
Advice on preparing a will (this example from Legal Aid Victoria):
https://www.legalaid.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-04/vla-resource-your-will.pdf
About the Author
