Why Nigerians should link bank and pension accounts to their wills – Seedwills CEO

Founder and CEO of Seedwills, Kelvin Ojomo, has emphasised the importance of linking personal bank and pension accounts to their wills.

A will is a legally binding document that outlines exactly how a person’s estate, including property, money, and personal belongings, should be distributed after their death. By appointing a trusted executor to manage the transition, the creator of the will (known as the testator) ensures their final wishes are honored and their loved ones are provided for according to their specific instructions.

Without this crucial document, an individual dies “intestate,” meaning local state laws and government formulas will dictate who inherits the assets, often leading to lengthy court delays and unintended family disputes.

Despite these benefits, a prevailing cultural misconception in Nigeria views estate planning as an expensive, tedious task reserved strictly for the elderly or the wealthy.

While modern financial technology is now streamlining the process, widespread education is still needed to show that wills are essential for everyone, regardless of age or financial standing.

In this exclusive interview with Nairametrics, Kelvin Ojomo, the founder and CEO of Seedwills, a digital platform that simplifies the process of will creation, says Nigerians should link their bank and pension accounts to their wills.

Nairametrics: What structural factors do you think keep the adoption of wills so low in Nigeria?

Kelvin Ojomo: I conducted a couple of studies, and I found out that eight in ten Nigerians have no will.

And there’s also been a lot of reports to say that adults in Nigeria are not thinking about will writing. With a population of over 250 million people, we know that about 111 million of those are already aged 18 plus. We would expect that knowledge is as penetrated, but that’s not what we have right now.

That’s why I said a lot of Nigerians do not have this. The reason behind this is a lot of people have some notions around will writing. They feel like you have to be a wealthy person to have a will.

And some other people feel like it’s complicated. You need to have a lawyer, you need to pay a huge amount of money to get this done.

So those misconceptions around it are what has prevented a lot of people from really doing this. Some people see it as maybe when you are on sick bed, when you’re on the dying bed, those are the times where you think about writing a will, or when you are very old, like 60, 70 years; that’s when you should think of a will. But this is not factual, because death is uncertain.

Whether it be a physical thing or just something in notes. You just want the people you want to get it to get it. But you want to be able to say, okay, after I’m gone, the things that I’ve worked for go to the people that I want, that I care the most about. So those are like the reasons why I’d say people have shied away from it because of a lot of these misconceptions we have about it being expensive, or its for wealthy people, or the aged group of people, which shouldn’t be the case.

Nairametrics: How does Nigerian law treat digitally created wills. Is there a particular law around that?

Kelvin Ojomo: The process is really straightforward. I mean, we have a consultant lawyer who looked at what we are building and was able to build a solution to ensure that whatever we are putting together stays within the ambit of the law. I know some countries have been able to switch to accepting digitally signed wills, but in the case of Nigeria, not yet. So the platform is also built in such a way that we pretty much just help you go through the process of knowing what to write and understanding what you are writing. The platform helps you come up with and generate that document, and then you physically have to sign it with your witnesses. So we prepare the documents that need to be signed with instructions on how to go about it. And of course, after that is when you then get to lodge the will in the appropriate courts.

Nairametrics: Probate in Nigeria is widely seen as slow and costly, how does that perception affect the demand for will-writing services, and what reform do you think will unlock the market?

Kelvin Ojomo: I think it’s also what we said about technology getting involved. Technology is a reform. A lot of costs that you do not need to go physically to the courts to go lodge a will. A lot of countries have adopted technology in making this process very seamless. It’s seamless in such a way that you can lodge these things online and then it’s secured. But that’s not the case in Nigeria because you still need to go physically to the courts and then do those process, which technology can then replace. So I think the reform around technology, like I said, some countries have even gone further to now accepting digitally signed wills, which is not a thing yet in Nigeria.

So I think it’s about getting technology involved in these processes. We are in the era of AI, we are in the era of technology getting better and institutionalized systems should also improve as technology continues to evolve. So I think those are the reforms to cut down the time.

Nairametrics: Do you think a will be linked to a person’s bank, insurance, and pension accounts?

Kelvin Ojomo: Absolutely. I mean, I think you literally are saying some of the things that we are already thinking. Talking in terms of partnerships with financial institutions. Just like you mentioned pensions and banks, because the current system of next-of-kin that we have in those situations has not been able to fill these gaps comfortably. So what we need is a will system that is properly integrated with banks and everything. It gives much more peace of mind to whoever is involved with those financial institutions.

Because then they’ll know it is secure. Whether it be in terms of their pensions or their finances or their shares or every other of those financial instruments, they are secured in the event of death, which we don’t know when it will eventually happen.

Nairametrics: Nigerians are very skeptical about putting sensitive legal and financial information online, how are you building trust around data privacy and document security?

Kelvin Ojomo: That’s a very important concern, especially because a will contains some of the most personal information a person can share. For us, building trust starts with being transparent about what happens to that information. Seedwills only collects the information needed to generate and manage a user’s will, and we don’t sell users’ personal information.

We also take security seriously at the infrastructure level. User information and generated wills are stored on secure cloud infrastructure, and data is protected through measures such as encrypted storage, secure HTTPS connections, access controls and other technical and organisational safeguards. Payments are handled separately through Paystack, so we don’t store users’ card details ourselves.

Just as importantly, users remain in control of their information. They can access their account, request corrections or deletion of their data, and contact us directly with privacy concerns.

We’ve also built Seedwills with the understanding that Nigerians may be hesitant to put sensitive information online. So rather than asking people to simply trust us, our approach is to be clear about what we collect, why we collect it, where it is stored, who helps us process it, and the measures we have in place to protect it.

Nairametrics: Traditional lawyers charge significant fees for wills; what is the true price elasticity in this market and how can a self-service model like yours achieve both affordability and profitability?

Kelvin Ojomo: Typically, like I said, if you’re going the traditional way, it will cost you more because now you’re speaking in terms of time, you’re speaking in terms of efforts by the lawyer and all that. But we’ve taken that out of the way and we’ve brought in technology.

And every time when technology comes in, you can expect that there will be a decrease in cost of that particular action because now technology is helping in that sense.

Because technology is literally what is doing the job for you here, our starting price, which is N29k, is what you need to basically get a will.

And what we’ve done with that is considered what the minimum wage is for every Nigerian. And like I said, made it very easy that everyone can access it.

Nairametrics: Looking at the broader African estate planning and insurtech space, what do you think needs to happen for digital will to move from a niche to mainstream in Nigeria?

Kelvin Ojomo: I’ll say education is a key part of it. Financial education, there’s been very little awareness about it, which is also the reason why a lot of families have struggled. Like if we talk about the emotional part of it, a lot of families have struggled because of this factor.

It’s a key part of life. It’s something that, at age 18, you should have some level of knowledge about it. It’s not even spoken of.

People hardly talk about this. So I think a lot of education, even in terms of like lawyers, government, coming together to ensure that estate planning gets a lot of awareness among the Nigerian populace. I think that’s very key.

Nairametrics: Take me through your growth rate from when you started. What was the acceptance rate by your users?

Kelvin Ojomo: The initial thing we did before even developing was to ask questions. So we did like a survey where we went to people, spoke with lawyers, and tried to understand if people would be willing to do this? Would people be able to, would people be willing to accept a product like this? And of course, we got positive answers.

It’s definitely a solution that is needed. I also need to mention here that it’s not like we don’t have this already being done in Nigeria before, but it’s not been done in the way we are doing it. So there are a few platforms that exist that do this as well, where they help people create a will online, but not as detailed and well-informed and easy to understand a process in such a way, which was why we did the first survey, because we wanted to look at how we can make this better, how we can make it simpler to understand as well. And so after that, what we’ve done as well is to invite people for tests.

So we’ve had two series of testing where we invited a group of up to 40 Nigerians to go through the product, test the product at every point in time to then be able to… So what we currently have is what we term the MVP, it’s the minimum viable product. We are still open to adding more features, because the world keeps evolving, and with technology, you can always improve the product. And also, because a will is something that requires regular updates, you might be in this position in life today, next year, something else might have come to your life and you want to add it to your will. So what we’ve done is we’ve made it easy to update. And like it’s a technology product, we’ll keep improving on that as well.

Nairametrics: Are you under any regulatory body, and how would you describe your relationship with them?

Kelvin Ojomo: I want to state that Seedwills is not a legal firm. We are not lawyers. In fact, a part of the product on our platform, there are certain responses that you give that the platform will tell you Seedwills is not better suited for you. The system will literally tell you, you are better suited to get a lawyer because of your family dynamic, depending on the answers you give, because we understand that different people with different complicated family dynamics, So we are not lawyers.

We are not a legal firm. So we are not regulated by maybe the legal body because we are basically a technology firm. And so we are being regulated as every other business in Nigeria. The platform helps you create the document. What you do with the document remains in terms of you physically signing it and then going to lodge it yourself. But as we progress, we might take up some of those things.

But at the moment, we sort of made it simple that the first step is you getting that document, you knowing that there’s a platform that makes it easy for you to get that document, and then you can proceed to the next step.

Nairametrics: What informed your decision to create such a solution around a will?

Kelvin Ojomo: I would say it started with a personal loss. Aside from that, I’ve always been very fascinated about technology simplifying everyday tasks processes. But then, not until when I experienced a personal loss of my dad did I then see the importance of it, because my dad, being a professional, all through his life, well-educated, well-read, I expected that he would have this document already. He would have some sort of writing where he has put all his wishes down.

I mean, this was a man who had properties. He did well for himself. And I would have expected that he had this thing because at the time it happened, of course, it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t like he was super ill. It was just very brief and happened immediately. And that’s the thing about death. It’s unexpected.

Nobody plans towards that. And so when it happened, we started to look for what did they put down? Did they put anything in writing to help us manage what’s going on? But we couldn’t find any. And pretty much we discovered there was none. And that was where that inspiration came from because that’s not a problem. And then we had to go through the banks, through a lot of stuff, just trying to manage a lot of things.

Even as I speak with you right now, it’s still an ongoing process with some of the things that we are still working on. And that informs the need why a product like this should be available, because in other advanced countries in the world, this is already the system. This is what is obtainable.

And it’s something that I feel like every adult as you go through life should have something like this, especially when technology can make it easy to do and easy to update as you continue your life journey. So that’s essentially what brought about the need.