I'm afraid I'm going to be a rare voice of dissent on the thread.
I had the benefit of coming to things late, as I was away when the email arrived to say I'd been selected to try the service, so I was able to read some of the feedback that had already been given and I was very struck by just how many people raved about how easy it was to use the service, and how they'd uploaded all their details while feeding the baby/sitting in the car/in the ad breaks on telly, etc - in other words, while not really paying attention.
It struck me that there is (hopefully) no other circumstance in which people would upload to a random website without thinking about it very much: their full name and address, their partner’s and their children's details, their financial information, including accounts, pensions, property, stocks and shares, jewellery and other valuable personal effects... It struck me as a great scam to be able to convince people relatively effortlessly that this is a good, peace-of-mind inducing thing to be able to do.
So I figured I would do some due diligence before filling out my own form, and this is what I found.
According to the website, Beyond was formed in 2015 and was formerly known as Funeralbooker. The website doesn't say exactly who they are, but it says they're based in an office in Bermondsey and it includes a jolly picture of six thirtysomethings (4 men and 2 women), which appears to have been taken in a public library.
However, if you then cross-reference this information with what Companies House holds, you'll find that Beyond, which is described as a solicitors business, is owned by 3 (male) solicitors in (or near) their fifties, was incorporated in 2017 and is based (or registered) in Manchester. Funeralbooker, which was incorporated in 2015 and is based at the Bermondsey address, is described as a ‘web portal’ business and is owned by 4 people, only one of whom describes himself as a solicitor (one is an 'entrepreneur'). There is no overlap in the officers of the two, and the identity of the chirpy folk in the photo is no clearer for all this information.
If you read the T&C’s on the Beyond site (you did all read them, right?) it would seem that the Beyond site is actually a web interface provided on Beyond’s behalf by Funeralbooker. In other words, that your data is being gathered by someone other than the solicitors you may have thought you were dealing with. And if you look in the FAQ, one of the questions is: ‘Can you see what I’ve written in my will?’ The not very confidence-inspiring answer, perhaps written by the happy people in the photo - or maybe the copywriters who create those witty cartons for Innocent smoothies - is ‘Nope.’
This is about the point where I decided it might actually not be that smart to upload some the most sensitive data about myself in existence to a random website just for the sake of a Mumsnet product test. So I did a web search to see if there was a general industry stance on the wisdom or otherwise of this kind of service, and found that online will makers are notorious for offering a low-cost service to compile and register a will that then ends up costing your estate a fortune because the website auto-selects the option to make the will maker company one of your executors. Just to be clear, Beyond is not one of those companies - but it was until Money Saving Expert took it to task about this practice a couple of years ago. So all of you who marvelled at the ease of making a will on your phone while doing two or three other things at the same time might want to think about that for a moment.
I don’t know what all of this adds up to. I hope everyone’s data is safe and I’m sure Mumsnet do their own due diligence before they decide to promote companies via the Insight threads. But I didn’t go through with the product test and my recommendation to anyone who feels they can’t afford to do a will properly through a high street solicitor (as I did when I signed up for the product test) is to do a bit of digging first to check they actually aren’t making a false economy.
Here endeth the homily.
