Vanilla Document Builder: Crafting Estate Plans with Care
Background
After the formation of Vanilla, we strategically decided to address a significant pain point for advisors. Advisors traditionally outsource the creation of estate planning documents to attorneys, leaving them blind to decisions that significantly impact a family's financial and life planning. With the automation of traditional service offerings like asset management, advisors have become foundational to clients' lives. Estate planning offers a profound opportunity for advisors to proactively engage in one of the most meaningful aspects of their client's financial and life planning.
Initial Document Generator
In 2019, we built the MVP for a document generation service. Collaborating with attorneys from the prestigious Arnold & Porter, we created a "Vanilla" estate planning document to support UHNW families and mass affluent and retail clients. This MVP enabled advisors to invite clients to create their documents through a simple stepped wizard, allowing clients to answer questions that populated a template.
We also introduced a payment system for users to pay for these services. However, feedback revealed that end-users were uncomfortable going through this process alone. To address this, we attempted to build an attorney network in each state to facilitate the process. Despite these efforts, we shut down this initiative to focus on our core advisor platform product after observing low adoption rates.
Challenges and Learnings
- Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) for Advisors: Ensuring compliance with UPL regulations to avoid advisors inadvertently practicing law.
- Navigating Attorney-Client Privilege: Maintaining confidentiality and legal integrity while facilitating document creation.
- Legal Fees and Online Payment: Structuring how legal fees for services are paid online.
- User Comfort: Addressing people's fear of creating legal documents without human support.
- On-Demand Printed Documents: Managing manual notarization until digital notarization for wills and healthcare directives becomes legal across all states.
Scaling and Enhancing Document Creation
Estate planning documents are essential to realizing an end-to-end estate planning platform. In 2021, we revisited this initiative, armed with the learnings from our initial attempt. My content designer, Emilie Von Unwerth, and estate planning attorney, George Burnett, worked closely to craft questions and support content, ensuring clients had the correct information to navigate the wizard without needing external support.
Working with the offshore engineering team HTEC, we built a scalable document generation service capable of creating the wizard and variations of new documents. I sourced and facilitated the procurement of a print vendor, Spectra, to print, fulfill, and ship on-demand printed documents. Our lead brand designer created custom packaging and folders for these physical documents.
In 2022, we relaunched Vanilla's Document Builder. Today, we support documents in in all states and allow advisors to pay on behalf of clients, integrating the cost into their service offerings. We've created video content to help advisors and their clients understand the decisions they are making. Recognizing the continued desire for attorney engagement, we partnered with Accelerant Law to offer a lower-cost option for clients to go through the process with an attorney.
Through extensive user tests and feedback sessions and utilizing FullStory to observe user sessions, we proactively identified pain points in the user flow, leading to improvements in questions and UI elements.
Care and Human Connection
A core theme of our design-driven approach at Vanilla is to help advisors build meaningful relationships with their clients by facilitating conversations about deeply personal decisions regarding emergencies or death. The content and user experience were designed to be warm and empathetic, avoiding the coldness often associated with traditional financial technology products. Our goal was to create an experience supporting advisors in sensitive, impactful conversations with their clients.
The idea of "care" is central to our design principles. We aimed to create a platform that demonstrates care for the user, showing that the advisor cares deeply for their client's well-being and, in turn, enabling the client to care for their family's future. This approach involved crafting an intuitive, supportive user experience that guides clients through the emotional and complex estate planning process. By doing so, we ensured that the Vanilla Document Builder serves as a functional tool and as a facilitator of trust and human connection between advisors and their clients.
Future
We are currently pursuing an attorney-specific offering of Vanilla, which allows attorneys to leverage our Document Builder and use Vanilla to enable their clients to fill out information and visualize their documents.
Key Results
- User-Friendly Interface: The Document Builder consistently receives higher NPS scores against our other SKUs.
- Regulatory Compliance: Successfully navigated complex UPL and attorney/legal regulations.
- Scalable Service: Built a scalable document generator service.
- New Market Opportunities: Opened a new line of business by offering Vanilla directly to attorneys.
- End-to-End Solution: Enabled Vanilla to become a comprehensive solution for advisors.
Current Team
Product Manager: Kendall
Product Designer: Cathy Tung
Graphic Designer: Jacob Halpern
Engineering Lead: James Ayres
Product Counsel: Patrick Carlson, Jenny Raess