The Bereavement Benchmark
The Bereavement Benchmark

Be good at the moment
that matters most.

Every firm says it's there for life. We show you how your bereavement journey feels to a family, and how you compare.

Get your free rating How it works

The FCA is reviewing how investment firms treat bereaved customers. Know where you stand before its findings land.

The Bereavement Benchmark
Rating report · October 2026

UK investment platform

Bereavement journey, rated on public evidence

Needs work
40out of 100

What's working

  • A named bereavement teamWith a direct phone line and email.
  • Warm, plain language"What should I do when someone has died?"

Where families get stuck

  • The page stops at the death certificateNo timescales or next steps.
  • Nothing on the money while they waitIt's all on the adviser site instead.
  • The wrong linksUnsubscribing, but not inheriting an ISA.

Priority action: move the wording the firm already has onto the page families read.

Anonymised examplePage 1 of 4

A real rating, anonymised. Every report covers 23 criteria, from finding help to settling the estate. See full sample reports

How it works

No calls, no forms to fill in on your side, and nothing goes public without you seeing it first.

  1. Tell us the firm

    Just a name. Your own, or one you're curious about.

  2. We rate the journey

    We go through everything a family would find online: your pages, your guidance and what bereaved customers have said in public. At this stage we only ever use publicly available information.

  3. You get the report

    Your score, what's working, what could be improved, and a priority action you can take straight away.

Get your free rating

Tell us which firm, and who should receive it. Your report arrives privately, before anything is published.

We only use public evidence. We never contact your customers, submit forms or test your process with false notifications.

Then go further, if you want to

The rating shows what you say. The Teardown shows what your systems actually do, because a lovely policy can still sit on top of a process that asks a widow for the same certificate three times.

The Toolkit

Launching in Q4

  • The complete best-practice guide to all 42 criteria, including the 19 we check behind the scenes
  • A full library of letter and email templates for every stage, from first contact to settlement
  • A research kit for running sessions with bereaved customers: recruitment, discussion guide and consent
  • A self-assessment scorecard, so you can re-rate yourself any time
  • A briefing pack for your board and compliance team
Get early access

The Teardown

From £5,000

  • Your real letters, emails, processes and policies, reviewed under NDA
  • Every touchpoint a family gets, counted and timed
  • What you promise against what actually happens
  • A prioritised fix plan
Talk about a Teardown

For larger firms: the Intensive, a redesign of the whole journey with your teams, tested with bereaved people. Price on application.

Where the criteria come from

Every firm is scored against the same 23 criteria, drawn from a body of knowledge built over more than 16 years of research, and of designing and deploying technology into life-changing moments: love, birth, serious illness and the end of life.

They are mapped to the four areas the FCA's review examines: communication, support for vulnerable customers, service standards and fees.

The Bereavement Benchmark is the first in a series of ratings for the moments when customers are least able to cope, and products are least tested.