Prioritizing time to grieve over paperwork: How Ribbon is streamlining the inheritance process (Brains Byte Back podcast)

Erick Espinosa
Fri, 01 Nov 2024 17:49:03 +0000
Brains Byte Back

In this episode of Brains Byte Back, Erick Espinosa sits down with Saeid Kian, CEO and co-founder of Ribbon, to shed light on the often-overlooked challenges of inheritance following the passing of a loved one and how his company is working to streamline the process for credit unions and their members.

His journey to creating Ribbon is a personal one. It was his father’s battle with cancer that exposed him to the antiquated and emotionally taxing process of inheritance. His time to grieve was met with a bureaucratic procedure that was unnecessarily lengthy and insensitive.

“The frustration of multiple in-person visits and endless phone calls to handle basic financial tasks after a loved one’s passing is something many families face,” Kian explains. This experience led him to question the efficiency of the current system and inspired the creation of Ribbon.

While Ribbon works to limit a family’s time spent completing the financial obligations following a loved one’s passing, Kian describes the overarching value it offers to credit unions. He touches on three key benefits: improving the experience for grieving members, reducing staff time spent on deceased accounts, and retaining more inherited deposits.

By automating paperwork and providing relevant, personalized service, Ribbon allows credit union staff to focus on empathetic interactions with members during difficult times while presenting an opportunity to retain generational wealth. Having a system in place for very real-world scenarios that prepares the staff for these anticipated interactions that are difficult to navigate, makes the process easier for all parties involved.

According to Kian’s research, many individuals can hold up to seven different accounts in various financial institutions, some of which could include credit unions. The pair discuss the difference between credit unions and banks in terms of products and services, with Kian highlighting that while credit unions can provide a more personalized experience, many fumble when it comes to technology.

As credit unions face the challenge of updating their systems and processes, solutions like Ribbon offer a path forward that benefits both the institutions and their members. By addressing the emotional and logistical complexities of inheritance, Ribbon is paving the way for a more compassionate and efficient approach to a universal human experience.

“The name ‘Ribbon’ represents inheritance as a final gift,” Kian shares at the end of the podcast. “Symbolizing the connection and legacy left by a loved one.”

You can listen to the full episode below, or on Spotify, Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Breaker,, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, Listen Notes, PodBean, and Radio Public.

Find out more about Saeid Kian here.

Find out more about Ribbon here.

Connect with Brains Byte Back host Erick Espinosa here.

Image Credit: The Sociable

TRANSCRIPT

Saeid Kian

I’m Saeed Kian. I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Ribbon, and we’re the inheritance platform for credit unions.

Erick Espinosa

So I’m delighted to have you join us for this episode of Brains Byte Back. We love connecting with founders and from my experience of doing this, and I think historically, a lot of ideas for founders are kind of born out of personal experience. That’s the case with you and ribbon, can you talk a little bit about your your story. I know it’s a little bit personal, but it but it did give you know that path towards that you’re on right now with Ribbon.

Saeid Kian

Yeah, I’ll share my background and kind of how it all led together. So I’m the first in my family, born in the US. My parents, you know, escaped the Iranian Revolution and moved to the US. I was born in the East Coast, raised there, and after graduating pretty quickly, I moved abroad. I went to Southeast Asia. I started off my career doing in development work aid agencies, consulting for large development organizations like the World Bank, the ILO, IFC, etc. I then moved to Myanmar, where I was part of a team that helped launch a mobile money into the company. And did I do that for a few years. Really exposed me to FinTech, and exposed me to like, the miraculous world of payments.

After doing that, moved to Singapore, where I was working for Facebook, back in the days, where it was just called Facebook, right? We were working on connectivity initiatives, mobile money initiatives, payments, ton of a ton of energy. It really helped expose me to not just FinTech and payments, but, you know, the broader tech world, and how tech and scale and how it can really impact people’s lives, especially when you’re talking about providing like, you know, things like new tools and new software. And that was really eye opening to me. And while I was still in Singapore, started working for Stripe, you know, it’s helping them expand to new markets, accept new payment methods, etc. And it was 2020, my wife and I were Singapore. My dad gives me a phone call, and he says, I have stage four pancreatic cancer, and the cancer had spread. And the news was, was really hard for us. You can imagine, you know, it was kind of the worst case scenario in terms of what we thought was going on. It was a few weeks where you’re telling us to have stomach pains. I kind of just rushed it off. I was like, okay, stomach ache, whatever. It’s probably nothing serious. And then here our world was more or less turned upside down.

So my wife and I were chatting, we were like, What should we do? You know, what’s what will make sense for us? We kind of take a step back. We think about our values, and we’re ultimately like, let’s just go home and spend time with him. So that’s what we do. We go back to Virginia, where, you know, where I’m from, my dad was living at the time, and move in with him and help him go to chemo, help them go to radiation. Do our last father son trips together. We also did all the logistics, right? Like I add myself to the accounts, cross tees, dot i’s, and we go through all that. He eventually goes to hospice, and then eventually he passed away. And he passed away our family. It’s really overwhelmed with grief. It’s really hard. It’s really sad, particularly with cancer. You know, the last final months, you can see them change physically. You can see them change emotionally. It’s it’s a lot to take in, and so not only am I overwhelmed with grief, but here I was, at the same time, completely surprised and shocked at how messy the the inheritance and the logistics were for dealing with him after he passed away, and to some degree, you know, he went through hospice.

I was grieving, but I wasn’t surprised by the fact that he passed away, but I was very, very surprised with how much work had to be done, and particularly how much it was offline, and how much of it required in person time, and how much of it just seemed really antiquated as compared to all the software and tools that we’re used to today. Like I have to go to in branch multiple times. Provide the same documentation over and over and over again. Everyone has a slightly different form to fill out. You’re often feel like you’re waiting in line, and you often feel like you’re on hold for like three hours while you’re getting transferred in between departments. And I just couldn’t kind of put two and two together. And pretty much what I realized was this was a situation that was a lose, lose, right? I was losing out because I had this terrible experience. I was going branch phone calls, etc.

Took me four visits over four weeks to get one basic checking account and then spread that across all the institutions I’m dealing with, right? And at the same time, they’re spending a ton of time on my account. So this is obviously operationally heavy for them, you know. I’m thinking about this. I’m like, this is taking your time too, like I said, isn’t this frustrating for you? And and then finally, like the final piece for me, which kind of put everything together, was they just gave me a check, and I just walked out the door. I’m not a wealthy person. I wasn’t inheriting a ton of money, but I was inheriting more than the average deposits they were holding, and here I am just taking a check and walking out the door. And when I met my co founder, we were talking about, you know, different experiences we’ve had and ways that we want to help the world. We were thinking like, what is something that I’ve gone through? And I was like, I have just gone through this experience that felt like a lose lose.

It made no sense. And then we started thinking about, well, what does a win win look like? What does it look like if an inheritor has an easy time, and if the credit union can also be able to accept the documentation, spend less time per deceased account, retain more of those deposits, keep more of that with the institution. Is there a win win, where everyone is just better off, and we realized that this is a perfect case for for software. And that’s, that’s where ribbon came up, and that’s where we decided that the inheritance platform was was something that the market was really banning.

Erick Espinosa

I think your story is very reflective of a lot of families out there. On a personal note, I just found out my dad was diagnosed about a month and a half ago. So we’re kind of in that same process, in trying to understand, okay, what are we going to do with finances, the same discussions as well about, like, future trips. But I imagine, for me doing this, my impression is I’m doing all of this, so it’s easier if, God forbid, it happens. What you discovered is, at that moment, everything that you’re doing before was just kind of like 2% in comparison to everything that was waiting for you that was taking away from your time to grief.

Saeid Kian

First of all, yeah, first of all, I’m really sorry to hear about that. Obviously, they’ve been there, and it’s tough, and there’s, like, a ton of things that I’m sure going through you and your family’s mind at the same time. And you know, my take on this is what I was sold is you do this work because it makes it easy, when, in the reality is, you do that work because you would rather spend two years of time than four years of time. And what we should be asking ourselves is, why is this two years of time? Now, you know, many cases in less than two years, and on average, you finance around 18 months to settle, to settle in a state, but you still look at that and you go, 18 months, like, what’s what’s taking is it? Is it really just probate time in court? Like, what’s taking 18 months? And you realize it’s just a lot of paper cuts and that’s at least what I realized on my side. So the work that you’re doing right now, first of all, I hope that, you know, his cancer can go into remission. I hope that obviously, he can get all the care that he needs, and obviously, I hope for a full recovery. But you do this work up front, and everyone should do this work, by the way, regardless of they have any kind of diagnosis. You do this work upfront, because the expectation is that it’s going to be a lot easier for after, if and when the inevitable happens. I would just find it surprising that no one was like, hey, it’s still going to be 18 months plus to deal with all the logistics. And then once we started digging in deeper, it’s like the why of the 18 months. We realized 18 months doesn’t have to be the case. This is all inclusive, end to end. This should not be more than a few months of work, especially when you’re talking about just the financial accounts, like just the checking savings, IRA, 401K, whatever, that should not be more than a week. There’s no reason for it to be more than a week.

Erick Espinosa

But what’s unique in your case as well, is that your dad his financial institution was a credit union.

Saeid Kian

Yes. Well, and the thing is, he had multiple, like most Americans, he had multiple accounts and he had multiple institutions. So it is not just credit unions that suffer with this, it’s all financial institutions. Try calling any bank and saying, my loved one passed away. See what happens. I mean literally. I ask any listener right now to call a bank and just say, hey, loved one passed away. What do I do? You’ll you’ll realize that you immediately start this maze that takes up hours of your time on that particular phone call. They’ll ask you for documentation. Oftentimes it, you know, you fall into this bureaucratic hole where they realize later on that, because of certain setup of an account, there’s a different form that’s needed, and it feels, it feels like an infinite game of phone tag. Let alone in branch visits. And the other thing I’ll add on top of this is, you know, grateful enough to say that I had a situation where I didn’t have kids at the time.

I could take off time from work, etc. Most people don’t have those options. They have kids. They have full time jobs. Going in branch is actually really inconvenient for a lot of people’s schedules. So the self serve option isn’t there. So he had an account with a credit union. He also had account. With a few different institutions. He actually had seven different accounts that we had to deal with. The average American has five, especially after covid. We saw a lot of folks signing up for things like Robinhood and Coinbase. Money’s all over the place. So you scale one bad process, and then you take it across the financial industry. Next thing you know, people who are grieving are spending months and months and months to get basic accounts.

Erick Espinosa

When I think of a credit union, I think of that being a little bit more old school, and they’re still around, but I feel like a lot of people don’t really notice that. Maybe the younger generation, at least, because I had to do my digging, you know, prior to this, to be like, what are the what are the key difference? Can you explain that to us?

Saeid Kian

Yeah, so at a very high level, a credit union is a not for profit organization. The members all pull in money into one organization called a credit union, and then they have shares in that, in that credit union. So, you know, kind of think of like, as a co-op. They all have, they all have a stake in that, that specific financial institution. A bank for but on the other hand, is for profit. You know, unless you buy shares, you’re you’re not, you’re not getting shares of a bank. When you put money with them, they’re just going to put money there and you’re going to get interest back. From the perspective of a member or customer, credit unions call their customers, they call members. Banks call their customers, customers. From the perspective of a member or customer, very similar financial products are there, but from a very different experience. And I think there is a reputation that credit unions are old school. They have a long history, especially in blue collar communities, especially in working class communities, especially in folks that wanted to like, you know, like unions that wanted to pull their resources together.

Think of it like, you know, everyone is working at the same factory, and they want to be able to, like, have their money put in the same place. They have a whole long history and those kinds of environments. And then over the past 20 years, they’ve gotten a reputation for becoming old school because they haven’t updated their systems fast enough. Now to their credit. I would say the credit union industry, over the past five years has really woken up. They’re really trying to focus on innovation, and the thing that they’re trying to do right now is focus on member experience and being able to provide the tools that pretty much folks across the US have come accustomed to. And the final thing, I’ll say, this is kind of like more of an unofficial difference between the credit union and banks is, you’ll generally find, as a rule of thumb, is that credit unions because members are all part of it, right? Because, you know, you’re quote, unquote, bought into the credit union. When you when you put your money in, you’re going to have a member shares, for example, that tend to have a really good relationship with the folks they know. It’s not uncommon to have a credit union have like a member service representative that knows your name, knows your background, knows your history, and folks who are part of credit unions like myself, the reason we love it is because they offer a certain personalized experience, which feels really like the care. That’s also one of the reasons why we were really excited to partner with credit unions, because it feels like the last missing piece here is when it comes to those who are grieving. It’s like they got a lot of the member experience that figured out that they haven’t quite gotten the what happens when you’re grieving scenario figured out.

Erick Espinosa

Surprisingly, there’s the same number of credit unions in the US as there are banks, roughly. So the numbers that I’m looking at here, I asked how many banks are in the US, and it says, as of March 31 of this year, the FDIC listed like roughly 4500 banks in total. And for me, I was under the impression that maybe credit unions would be less, but that’s not necessarily the case. That there’s more. Actually it’s 4600 federally insured credit unions.

Saeid Kian

Interesting.

Erick Espinosa

They said those numbers are dropping every year, but it tends to be the same with banks. But they’re also saying the value of assets for these institutions continues to increase. But what I think was very interesting that you mentioned I used to work for a bank years ago. Bank years ago, Scotiabank, and I’ve worked in the branch that was like one of my first jobs. And what the best thing about being there was developing the relationships with the people that came in. And it was always an older generation of people. They wanted that sense of community. And I swear some of them were older people that would literally just take out the money to come back the money to come back the next day and put it back into the account. But I always felt it was just the reason to come back to the bank and have that type of relationship. But what makes sense, and I feel like this is what you guys are doing, is you’re basically automating the system for the credit unions in terms of, you know, helping with this process. Is that fair tosay?

Saeid Kian

Yeah and I would say, even at a higher level, it’s replacing the conversation of paperwork and bureaucracy with conversations about products and services that are relevant to you. And if you, for example, if you’re working at the branch and you want to have that relationhip. A great way to have a relationship is to not be asking out forms, right? Like, you should be asking, how’s your day? If someone comes in and says, I lost my spouse. You should be asking, how are they doing? How are you are you okay?

Erick Espinosa

100%

Saeid Kian

Is everything okay with you? But you’re in a situation right now where these folks working in the branch, these folks working in the deposit operations team. They’re asking about, you know, do you have your letter of affidavit? Do you have your letter of intent? Is this the death certificate? Did you have that available? Right now, you’re asking about all this paperwork. And so what we’re trying to do is exactly like you said. Why not automate that paperwork? Because it’s important, it’s compliance and legal reasons. So you have to have it, right? Why don’t automate that and then be able to then, instead, have a conversation about things that are actually relevant.

Erick Espinosa

So you’re offering that technology to the credit unions. How does that work, exactly?

Saeid Kian

So we go to any credit union and we say, here’s three things that we think are important for you, and let us know if you agree or disagree. First one is that folks who are grieving members or non members, when they come and they’re interacting with you that should leave a way with the experience that was empathetic. Is the experience for the for your members and non members important?

Second one is, do you feel like you should be spending a ton of time on deceased accounts for your operations team, or do you feel like your operations team has better things to do? And the third thing is, do you feel like right now with the great wealth transfer, with inheritance working the way it is. Do you feel like right now, like you’re able to retain a lot of the great wealth transfer, or are you able to retain the deposits that are being inherited from one generation to the next? If your answer is, I care about experience. I don’t want to spend a ton of time on deceased accounts, and I don’t feel like I’m getting the full advantage of being able to participate in great wealth transfer, then wonderful.

What you can do is you can take ribbon software, take this widget, put it onto your website, also have a link that your call center or your branch can easily SMS or email out that goes to the person who’s inheriting. They’ll be able to submit documentation, and your team through an admin portal is going to get everything they need to one place to not just make decisions on the inheritance, but also do things like send flowers, send notes. Do the things that we think is important to maintain a relationship so someone doesn’t just take a check and walk out the door.

Erick Espinosa

How do you really incentivize it in terms of, you know, trying to keep those people in the bank right, like you were talking a little bit about, obviously, the technology side, but what’s the main thing that you do to keep those people from like walking out with that check from the door?

Saeid Kian

That is such a great question. So I’ll say a few things about this. First one is, we’ve talked to a lot of folks who’ve lost a loved one, and it is like unanimous across the board, which is, if you just made me wait six hours on a phone call, don’t you dare try to offer me some loan or product that you have right now. I don’t want to hear it right? It’s very emotional and visceral reaction you have. So you have absolutely no chance of maintaining that relationship if they just had a bad experience when they lost a loved one, right? So that’s like table stakes. You need to be able to offer a basic human experience. An empathetic experience.

The second thing is, you’re not going to be able to retain anyone if you’re not knowing who’s coming in and when they’re coming in and what accounts it deals with. And because right now, it’s fragmented, and it’s all in a bunch of different places. You know, you go to any executive of any financial institution, ask them, hey, how many of your members or customers passed away this month. Almost always they don’t know. They have to go check it out. They don’t actually know and have the details in front of them, the insights, the data, to say, here’s who came in, here’s their situation, etc. Let’s figure out a playbook to be able to run.

Third thing, I would say, is being able to, and I’ll actually give a personal story for this. Be able to give relevant promotions or products and services after that empathetic experience. So like, what do I mean by that? Well, I remember I walked and this is, like, a personal experience that, you know, we’ve talked to a lot of folks who’ve had something similar happen. I remember I walked into a branch, and it was my fourth visit, you know, about a month of going back and forth, because obviously I can’t go every single day. So I’d like, you know, okay, I come back next week, or whatever, you know, you get through that certificate. Okay, I got this form filled out. Okay? I got a form. I’ll do this later on, closing form. Okay, I’ll bring that in later. Go through the whole process. The frontline lady, she was helping me out. Super lovely, really nice. Andwe’re literally right about to wrap up, about to get a check. And I noticed there was a banner on the wall. It was like a promotional offer. It said, you know, get $300 if you do X, Y and Z. It was like some basic, you know, requirements, like direct deposit, etc. And as I’m sitting there, like time, tapping my, you know, hands on the counter, waiting for her to, like, wrap up, I was like,

Hey, by the way, am I eligible for that 300 bucks? So I was like, kind of going through requirements. I was like, I’m pretty sure I could hit this. Like, I wonder if you just, like, kept it here, and I just, like, went to, like, get some food or something, I can just come back in a few months, you know, maybe I can get a few 100 bucks out of it. And she hesitated, she didn’t know. She was like, let me ask my manager, I’m not sure. And I was like, ah, you know what? Forget it. Just give me the check. So I take the check. I literally, I leave. She calls me 20 minutes later, and she’s like, wait, wait, wait, you are eligible. You are eligible. But. Was too late. I had already left like the check is gone, right? So what I mean by that story is there are a lot of paper cuts that lead, that lead to churn, and there’s a lot of solutions for retention. The most obvious one is run campaigns, run promotions for relevant products. Great CD rates, so great Auto Loan Rate. A bonus for opening up a checking account.

The things you already do make it relevant for them, I would argue, make specific ones based on their scenario, based on their accounts, based on how much they’re inheriting, and run offers so that they know that they’re eligible if they stay there. Most folks will take you up on it, because they get to it’s the best case scenario for someone who’s grieving. I got to save a ton of time. I got some money. It’s in this account. I know it’s safe. I can go deal with the funeral, I can deal with other things in my life. And that ability to run campaigns, as we think, like really critical to that retention piece. And then the final cherry on top is being able to do what we kind of consider like the the cherry on top of experiences is send flowers, send a note, send a chocolate. Like I often joke, like half my friends didn’t send me flowers. How crazy would it be if a credit union send you flowers when you told them you lost a loved one?

I mean, imagine, imagine getting off like a big bank. Imagine, like, being on hold with Charles Schwab for like four hours, hanging up, and then go to your credit union, submitting all your documents, getting your inheritance, and literally, the next day, you open the door and there’s flowers there. Like the delta of experience is so high. So when we think about retention, how you can convince folks to stay, we think of all the above strategy. Because we don’t think there’s going to be a silver bullet to this. We just think that the whole way of inheritance needs to change.

Erick Espinosa

I think the word personalization has become so connected to things like social media, but I feel like we forget what personalization means in an experience like interactions that’s one to one, and what that means for them personally when they’re interacting with with, you know, like a large company. So those little details I feel make a world of a difference, leave a lasting impact. So from what I understand, what Ribbon is doing, it’s not just eliminating the paperwork, but it’s equipping, I guess, the staff with the knowledge in terms of what to do exactly, step by step. When you have a client that comes in and says, somebody close to them and passed away, right? And you’re and you’re there to assist them.

Saeid Kian

Exactly and we just don’t think you can shortcut an empathetic response. Like, if I tell you I lost my dad, and you just send me a generic email and says, sorry, like I I’m gonna sniff the inauthenticity, and I’m not gonna care, and it actually might be rubbing the wrong way. If I’m waiting on hold, then you just have a generic AI message that says I’m so sorry for your loss. I’m gonna sniff the inauthenticity. I’m gonna know you don’t care, right? And I’m not only that, I’m gonna be really frustrated that giving me a bad experience while you’re giving something inauthentic. So the question that we face at its core is like, how can you give that personalization, that one to one in a scalable way, and exactly like you said, it’s about empowering the people who are already there to know who came in. How can I send you gifts? How can I make sure that I at the very least called you and told you in person I’m sorry for your loss? Give them the tools to be able to give them that wow, experience.

Erick Espinosa

I 100% agree. I know you’ve only been doing this for about a year, but have you heard any stories maybe that have connected with you? Maybe somebody like a credit union that you worked with specifically, and maybe somebody from the branch that shared, you know, their experience of serving somebody that had just lost somebody close to them.

Saeid Kian

So many. The CEO that we are working with lost his mom about nine months ago. And, you know, him just talking about, like, it’s just, it’s not scalable. You know, it was like, kind of like kind of like, this wake up call for him, or he explained, like, this is this is not going to work. I’ve spoken to operations folks or folks on the front line who’ve told me that they’ve gotten yelled at, and they’re like, they’re not sure what to do, you know, like they’re sitting there. They’re like, the worst day imaginable, right? Like someone who is grieving, who, like, lost their spouse has just screamed at you at the top of their lungs, and you’re sitting there crying because you’re like, It’s not my fault. I don’t have the tools to be able to help you. And so when I hear stories like that, it really resonates on a very emotional level, because you realize it’s not the fault of the ops person, it’s not the fault of the call center, right?

Like, there’s no one here who’s just, like a bad person. We don’t have the technology and the solutions in place to make sure that this is easier for everyone. And I think what we’ve seen, especially as we’ve done like a listening tour for credit unions across the country, is they’re just, they feel like they don’t have the solutions in place to make this work in an empathetic way. To the point now where I remember there are two different folks who remember, who told me something very similar, which is, like, I’m almost scared to come in and hear that, because I am not sure what to do. That to me, is a failure of a market, like a market should then be providing a solution. That’s when a company should come in and provide a solution. Because when you’re saying, I hope no one comes in today and tells me I lost someone because I don’t even know what to do. I have to, you know, deal with someone who’s crying in front of me, and until the paperwork, the moment you hear that, the moment you go, Okay, this is, this is a place for technology to come and help out.

Erick Espinosa

So I guess I want to end this by asking, I was kind of interested a little bit in terms of what Ribbon stood for. Some reason I feel like, I don’t know why, I feel like it could be a metaphor for something? You mind sharing, maybe where that name came out of?

Saeid Kian

Yeah. If I take a step back, I think inheritance has become…it’s a word that you understand to associate just with, like money, and it’s become this kind of transactional term. And what I realized when I lost my dad was that his accumulation of life’s work was handed to me as his last gift. It was his last gift to me, right? It was he literally gave me a gift. And to me it was like, this is the last gift that is being handed to me, what ties off a gift, and that’s when we’re like, Ribbon. That’s, that’s where ribbon comes in.

Erick Espinosa

Wow. Okay, that’s beautiful. I think what you’re doing is beautiful. It’s a very specific segment of a market, but I think you’re, you’re adding value to a community that that needs it. If somebody wants to get in touch with you and learn a little bit more about Ribbon, how could they do that?

Saeid Kian

So our website is www.trustribbon.com. You can always reach out to us from there, and then the best way to do it is just go to our website. If you want to see a demo, we’re happy to schedule a demo. You can always email me at Saeid@trustribbon.com. I try to be very responsive to emails, although sometimes it can be, it can be hard and yeah, just please reach out. We love, love, love, hearing from folks

Erick Espinosa

Thank you so much again for joining us on this episode of Brains Byte Back. I’m wishing you all the success in the world in helping those at a time basically that they need it the most.

Saeid Kian

Thank you so much for having me. It was it was a real pleasure. Appreciate the chat.

Image credit: The Sociable