Simplifying and Streamlining Estate and Trust Administration

Reading Time: 6 min

Estate administration can be an emotionally taxing and time-consuming process. Estates range from simple to complex, with multiple financial accounts and assets having to be collected, assessed, and managed. The founders of Estateably, who had firsthand experience navigating the arduous estate management system, realized this was an industry that would benefit greatly from digitization.

To accomplish this, they needed a financial technology partner that would help elevate their product offerings by incorporating financial data aggregation and real-time reporting into their platform. Flinks was the solution.   

---

CHALLENGES: 

• Removing the inefficiencies associated with collecting, organizing, and submitting banking and wealth account information 
• Simplifying and streamlining the estate administration process to ease the burden on both firms and beneficiaries 
• Cutting down the overall time it takes to administer estates 

SOLUTIONS: 

• Flinks Data Aggregation integrating into Estateably platform to easily connect bank and investment accounts from various sources, both in Canada and the United States
• Flinks’ API facilitating accurate reporting and faster access to financial account information
• Real-time account access significantly cutting down on estate processing time

---

When we talk about a mission, we’re moved by this notion that time is precious, right? With Flinks, we could add next-generation technology to our industry to help reduce frustrations and ease the burden on firms and families.

Ari Brojde, Co-Founder and CEO of Estateably 

---

Estateably faced three major challenges: 

1. Lack of digitization

Digitally stagnant industry that’s been overlooked, especially with the procurement and processing of relevant financial documents and information

2. Accuracy

Accuracy issues due to manual input of information and lack of access to real-time information

3. Time-consuming

Labor-intensive collection of account information, especially from complex estates spanning both US and Canada leading to delays in estate settlement

---

Enter the Estateably + Flinks Partnership

Expediting the estate administration process

There is a significant amount of manual labor associated with estate and trust administration. This includes high volumes of redundant data entry, multiple inputs of information from various sources, flows of data (where an output of one process then becomes an input to another process), and so on. The entire process of settling an estate from end to end can also be very long and tedious, with many Canadian estates taking between 24 -36 months to settle!

Regardless of the complexity of the estate or trust in question, Estateably is able to save practitioners countless hours and potentially days of work by utilizing Flinks’ API. With Flinks Connect integrated into Estateably’s comprehensive platform, the real-time access to financial account information has helped practitioners directly access relevant information in real-time. 

Consider this: A clerk receives a stack of brokerage and bank statements for the last twelve months. Each brokerage statement’s transaction section will have at least 30 lines of financial transactions on each page. All those transactions need to be transferred from a physical piece of paper into a digital one. Each page takes at least 30 minutes to transfer. For a single account over the course of 12 months, that’s 6 hours of data entry! 

With Flinks, it’s instant!  Flinks automates this process by keeping the transactions pulled into Estateably up to date. Practitioners simply log in and the information is already input and ready for use. If statements are required as back up, Flinks also offers APIs to fetch those statements, allowing practitioners to better allocate their resources elsewhere and improve their overall productivity. 

Precision and accuracy of financial information

No matter how experienced or fast an administrator is, human error is inevitable with the manual collection and input of data. By utilizing Flinks’ API, Estateably has helped practitioners achieve near perfect rates of reporting accuracy by providing up-to-date financial account information in real-time. 

As a key component of their Power of Attorney and Guardianship product, accounting firms now have direct consent-based access to client bank accounts. This automation allows firms to significantly increase accuracy rates by removing the need to manually cross-check and validate information. Everything is immediately available to users as soon as they log in to the Estateably platform, ensuring no valuable information is skipped over or misreported. 

For example, if a client requests a reconciliation report or a simplified accounting, the firm would have to go into every holding that the account had and update the information manually before transferring that information into a report. Anything that’s associated with that bank account would need to be manually typed to prepare that reconciliation or accounting report. 

With Flinks, users simply click a button to generate the report. By removing the manual input of data and having direct access to financial accounts, human error is removed and accuracy rates increase to over 95%. 

There’s greater compliance because you’re pulling all the transactions in for the user automatically. They’re less prone to errors when entering something incorrectly. It’s human nature to do that. With Flinks’ secure methods of accessing financial information and everything being available in real-time, Estateably is secure, it’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s accurate.

Ari Brojde, Co-Founder and CEO of Estateably

Data aggregation sets Estateably apart from competitors

The trust and estate management landscape traditionally relies on old legacy systems, which are labor intensive and non-automated. By incorporating financial data aggregation into their platform, Estateably is innovating and digitizing the space by moving the technology forward while also simplifying and streamlining the estate and trust management process. It’s also led to a noticeable increase in their product adoption since going to market. 

Before we offered Flinks’ capability, we had firms that were asking for data aggregation and told us they wouldn’t move forward with our solution until we had that. So Flinks was helpful to land customers.

Ari Brojde, Co-Founder and CEO of Estateably 

Flinks’ commitment to offering a comprehensive connectivity solution that spanned both Canada’s and the United States’ financial institutions without compromising their Canadian market was also integral for Estateably. When working with US-based competitors, Estateably found that support for the Canadian market was lacking. 

Being able to partner with Flinks, a leader in data aggregation in Canada, helped them solidify their standing in the Canadian market thanks to the quick reactivity of the Flinks team. Prioritizing the needs of clients whose work spans both the United States and Canada without neglecting the Canadian market helped Flinks stand apart from their competition. It also helped Estateably appeal to more potential customers because of this reliability and scope. 

Being able to differentiate ourselves in the Canadian competitive landscape by partnering with Flinks, I think, was also very important.

Chris Brockwell, Director of Professional Services at Estateably

Key Takeaways

1. Estateably is digitizing a stagnant industry and bringing automation to estate processing by utilizing Flinks’ API
2. Flinks Connect has helped Estateably set itself apart from the competition with their next generation technology and automation  
3. The accuracy and reliability of data aggregation was a necessity for Estateably and its platform adoption 

---

You might be interested in: