After navigating her own recent losses, an influential financial advisor is teaming up with a tech firm to help grieving families confront the administrative burdens surrounding death.
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Earlier this month, YGC Wealth founder Rianka Dorsainvil became the first strategic advisor and board member for technology vendor BestFarewell. The firm’s services aid bereaved families — and financial advisors, employers or funeral homes working with them — in compiling and organizing end-of-life planning documents. In the Q&A below, Dorsainvil explains what drew her to the role and how the many emotional and technical challenges connected to the death of friends and family members are changing estate planning tech and
“Rianka has spent her career sitting across from families at the exact moment financial planning becomes personal. She understands what it means to help someone prepare for the future in a way that feels human and not transactional,” Jay Wilburn, the CEO of BestFarewell, said in a statement. “That perspective is irreplaceable when you’re building a product that lives at the intersection of financial readiness and family legacy. She doesn’t just advise BestFarewell on strategy, she keeps us honest about the families we’re actually building for.”
BestFarewell anticipates working with 100,000 families this year, and the firm has started a pre-seed funding round aimed at raising $1 million. A friend directed Dorsainvil — who has
The below interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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Firsthand connections
Financial Planning: What made you interested in BestFarewell, and made you want to get involved to the point of being its first board member?
Rianka Dorsainvil: What attracted me to join BestFarewell as their first strategic advisor and board member is that the mission just immediately felt personal, after experiencing losses of loved ones firsthand. My best friend passed away earlier this year, and my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly last year.
It was overwhelming, as you can probably imagine, and so I know how overwhelming it can be to receive that phone call, and then immediately after that, have to shift to handling documents, making decisions, figuring out where the accounts are, making funeral arrangements, figuring out family logistics, all while still grieving. BestFarewell solves that problem. That is a real problem that it solves, where so many families are faced [with] dealing with grief and a loss of a loved one, but often aren’t prepared for it until they’re in the middle of the hardest season of their life.
BestFarewell
And so I was drawn to the opportunity to bring more visibility to the tool, the resource, and to also to help just spread the awareness around it, so that when a loved one passes away — it’s not “if” — when a loved one passes away, it’s less chaotic, it’s more organized, and it’s just more of a compassionate way for us to help families [in] that place.
BestFarewell actually found me. A friend of mine found the tool on social media. She sent it to me, of course, because I’m a financial advisor, but she was just like, “Hey, Rianka, this tool looks so interesting.” So this was maybe the middle of the fall, immediately after my father-in-law passed away. I’m like, “Gosh, I really wish we had this tool before he passed.” I was like, “Oh, I’ll look into it — I don’t have the capacity right now, but I’ll look into it.” And then my best friend passed. I then needed to help her family, because she was a best friend of mine. I knew a lot of her information, I knew where her life insurance policy was, I knew where her bank accounts were, and all of that, but then I thought about BestFarewell, that there is a tool out there for this.
How can I continue to help my friends and family without just being me in the middle of it? So I did a demo with Jay, who’s the CEO and founder of BestFarewell, and when I saw the tool, I was blown away. I was just like, “Wow.” It’s a lot of work that you have to put in on the front end, of course, uploading your estate documents, entering data such as account information and where all the financial accounts are. But once it’s in there, when a loved one passes away, man, it’s just going to make things so much more easier. The administrative burden is not going to be there anymore.
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How BestFarewell works with advisors
FP: I’m very sorry for your losses. That’s always difficult, and I know that there is so much involved with it, both emotionally and financially.
As a planner yourself, as you try to prepare clients for everything involved with the loss of a loved one, how does the emotional side tie into the financial side and the burdens that a service like BestFarewell can help families through in that process?
RD: We have just launched a tool called Mantle, the financial advisor-facing piece of BestFarewell. And it came out of me just sharing — “Hey, I would love to share this with my clients, but how can I, if I’m giving them individual users, like, I would love to see it all in one place.” And so that was the inception of Mantle.
Mantle is a service where it bridges between wealth management firms and families; KinWell is the [broader] product of BestFarewell. KinWell is the tool that everyone will be using.
Mantle is basically the financial advisor hub to be able to service the clients, giving them access to their KinWell portal. How it will help us as financial advisors is that I also, unfortunately, have the experience of clients passing away. I’m so grateful that we had access to everything. As the financial advisor, I had access to their financial accounts that I was managing, and also their estate planning documents, because I was an integral part of making sure that the estate documents were getting done. But everything else I didn’t have access to, nor was the client thinking to have all these kinds of things ready. It’s easier when you’re working with a client who is married or has a significant other, because the hope is that the significant other has this information. But if they don’t have a source and one place to go to, like, what’s the utility account number? What’s the phone account number?
Typically, in relationships, there’s one person handling the financial components of it, and, if that loved one that was handling the financial component of it passes away, you will want that surviving loved one, spouse or significant other to have immediate access to that. So, while that’s not my job as their financial advisor to make sure that they have the utilities account number or their cell phone account number, if I can provide them a resource to make sure when that call happens, or when that day happens, they have the resource to make sure that administrative burden is one less thing that they have to worry about, and they can just put their loved one to rest, then that is a responsibility of mine, and that’s where Mantle comes in for BestFarewell.
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Getting an edge in the great wealth transfer
FP: Everyone has been talking about the great wealth transfer at length. As a planner, how would you assess the industry’s progress on this challenge? Where is wealth management right now, and what does that mean for the future of the industry?
RD: It’s funny that we’re chatting about this now, because I did not build my firm thinking that I would be the wealth transfer recipient. But that is what happened.
So, when I built my firm, I started working with millennials. We were the youngest working generation at that time, and now we have Gen Z and now, Generation Alpha, right? And then it was millennials, Gen Xers, the baby boomers and the Silent Generation. Well, the Silent Generation is passing away and passing on their wealth to Gen X and millennials.
Because I grew up with millennials and millennials are my clients, I am helping my clients receive that wealth transfer. So I am seeing firsthand the wealth transfer actually happening. There has always been a conversation of, how do we kind of reach down to the next generation and talk to them, you make them your clients, you know that a lot of wealth management firms right now are focusing on retirees and preretirees, which, from a business model perspective, I totally get it.
I’ll say firsthand, working with millennials — the elder millennials, as we are now — it’s a lot of work. We have a lot of transition happening, we are expanding our family, we’re getting married. There’s divorces happening, there’s purchases happening from homes to businesses. There’s still a lot of moving parts versus the preretirees and retirees. They’re at the end of their career, they’re thinking about, when’s my next vacation? When’s my next golf trip? So it’s not that much going on, but they will pass away, and when they pass away, it’s going to their heirs, and you have not had a conversation with their heirs, right? Their heirs, their beneficiaries already have financial advisors, and, if they’re anything like me, they’re really great financial advisors, and there’s no way that you’re going to be able to take any of my clients away once that wealth transfer happens, because we have a solid foundation.
Also, what’s happening is parents of my elder millennial clients are becoming my clients. The reason that’s happening is because they’re either the only child or they’re the eldest daughter, and they know once their parents pass away, they’re going to have to figure it all out by themselves.
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An employee benefit
FP: Thank you so much for the time today. What else should our audience know about anything we’ve discussed?
RD: I’m really looking forward to bringing BestFarewell into firms in the form of Mantle. This would be such an amazing tool and resource for employers to offer as an employee benefit, because there’s the legal aspect that I see from an employee benefit standpoint. Employers can offer a legal benefit in which they can get estate documents, such as wills, trust, powers of attorney.
What [tends to] happen when a loved one passes away is that we have to take not only bereavement — and it’s great when an employer gives bereavement — but the administrative burden lasts for months. Providing a tool like BestFarewell to your employees will help them from an administrative standpoint, so that they can come back to work sooner. And the mental capacity that they need to have for the passing of their loved one, they can have a little bit more for — I don’t want to make it seem like for work. But it’s just, I have fewer things to worry about when it comes to the administrative things of settling an estate. I can give more to what I love to do at work.
