The co-founder of North East tech start-up Settld is on a mission to tackle the “horror stories” grieving families experience when notifying companies about the death of loved ones, with a vision to take the company global.
Prior to the death of her grandmother in 2019, Vicky Wilson, the co-founder and CEO behind Settld, had been working at Amazon for almost eight years in various senior roles.
“My lovely grandma, she and I were very close,” she told Prolific North.
“It just hit like a bag of bricks when she died, the family had asked me to take care of her affairs.
“It was really, really difficult. There were so many things that went wrong.”
Following “hours on call queues”, she was forced to navigate a myriad of utility, bank and pension providers to notify them of her grandmother June’s death.
Around 600,000 people die every year in the UK, but she explained it takes the average family approximately 6-10 hours just to notify companies to close accounts with an additional 8-10 weeks spent on all the follow-up.
“I just ended up thinking this is absolutely abysmal,” she said.
Initially taking a sabbatical from her job at Amazon, she joined an accelerator programme where she found her experience dealing with the death of her grandmother was a shared one.
Propelled by hearing “horror” stories from fellow grieving families and her own frustrations traversing the end-of-life world of admin, it was then that she decided to launch Settld.
Through the SaaS company, she has since set out to simplify the process for grieving families who need to notify companies of the death of a loved one, as well as challenging companies to improve their policies when dealing with deaths.
With the help of fellow co-founder and her mother, Julie Wilson, the pair launched the company’s bereavement notification service last year, which is now headquartered in Sunderland with 10 staff.
How the Settld platform works
From banks, utility companies, subscription services, card and insurance companies, the service is designed to help bereaved families and individuals through the process of notifying multiple companies of a death.
