As we prepare to launch the Valoren system in 2026, a short reflection on the thinking informing its design is appropriate. Not a customer-research write-up; not a pitch. A note on three patterns the external evidence on preparedness behaviour points to, the third of which runs against the intuitive view and which we are still thinking through.
First — preparedness is a maintenance discipline, not a setup task
The implicit model of most estate-planning products is that the user does a meaningful chunk of work once — writes the will, sets the LPAs, lists the assets — and the work is then complete until something material changes. The lived pattern looks different. The records that matter most for an executor are the ones most likely to be out of date: the bank account that was added in the last year, the pension that was consolidated last spring, the password manager that replaced the spreadsheet of passwords, the trusted person who moved and changed phone number. The setup task is achievable in an afternoon. The maintenance task is achievable in twenty minutes, twice a year, indefinitely.
The product-research evidence on retention points the same way. The surfaces that earn return visits are not the intake flows. They are the small update flows — the field-level edits to records that already exist, the recheck of a single item after a change in circumstances. We expect the most valuable surfaces in the Valoren system to be these small maintenance flows, and we are designing for them first. The product that survives is the product that is comfortable to come back to.
Second — the trusted person conversation is harder than the records
Naming a person and assigning them permissions is a five-minute software task. Telling that person they have been named, explaining what they would be asked to do, and confirming they accept — is, for many households, a difficult conversation that gets deferred indefinitely. A carefully structured trusted-person nomination can easily go uncommunicated to the person nominated; the design has to assume it will. The more durable arrangement is the opposite one: the household where the conversation happens first, with the structure assembled afterwards.
The second of these is materially more robust, and it is the case the design guards for. The product cannot have the conversation; it can only support it. So the system surfaces the conversational scaffolding alongside the structural one. A nomination is treated as provisional until the person nominated has been briefed; the system says so.
Third — the unexpected pattern
The intuitive expectation — borne out in most personal-finance categories — is that uptake skews toward adults in their fifties and sixties, the cohort most likely to be thinking about estate matters. The external evidence on preparedness behaviour suggests the real age distribution may be broader and flatter than that. The 2025 SunLife research on attitudes to later-life planning, among others, points to materially more engagement than expected from adults in their thirties, particularly those with young children — and the framing that resonates with them is not estate planning. It is operational preparedness: what would my partner do if I were hit by a bus tomorrow. This is the cohort we want to test against at launch.
We have not settled this, and it is an open question for launch. The hypothesis we are designing around is that the death framing is uncomfortable for younger adults, but the incapacity framing — being unreachable for a week, being hospitalised, being briefly unavailable — is not. The product is built to support both. We did not design it primarily for the latter; if the evidence holds, that use case is one we expect to surface anyway, and we want to be ready for it.
What this means for the first year after launch is partly already visible in the product roadmap and partly still being thought through. Two notes that will recur, both grounded in this design thinking: a will is not where preparation ends, and the work of preparation is more about conversation than it is about software.