It all started with a 70-page letter.

Every asset. Every password. Every bill, listed.

Except one.

That one subscription took Colin Jowell’s family nine months to cancel after his dad passed away in 2020.

And it’s the reason he founded and built BillWill.

The Smart Scale Summit’s 2026 FinTech Winner

BillWill walked away with our 2026 Smart Scale Summit fintech award, and the room couldn’t stop talking about it afterwards.

Here’s the bit that told me it was actually good: the advisers signing up in that room weren’t only thinking about their clients. They were signing up to use it on their own ageing parents. Some were signing up to set it up for themselves.

When a room full of financial advisers wants a tool for their own family before they’ve even left the building, that’s worth paying attention to.

Two Features That Had Everyone Leaning In

BillWill turns a client’s financial plan into a legacy plan in under five minutes of your time. There are around 20 short modules in total, covering the usual things: assets, liabilities, bank details, a document vault.

But these two features are the reason it won.

It doesn’t just store the information. It acts on it.

BillWill finds a client’s bills and subscriptions automatically, and next to each one, the client leaves an instruction: close it, transfer it, keep it running for the kids. When the day comes, BillWill actually makes those calls. Not the vault, not the folder. Real calls, real cancellations. Nobody’s family spends nine months on hold to a call centre for a subscription nobody else knew existed.

It writes the letter nobody can bring themselves to write.

Ask any parent to sit down and write a letter for their child’s guardian, and they’ll freeze. It’s too big, too sad, and the page stays blank for years. So BillWill asks the easy questions first: what’s her favourite thing in the world, what does he hate, what do you do when she can’t sleep. Only once a parent is twenty minutes in and remembering why they’re doing it does it ask the harder question: what do you want for her future? AI turns the answers into a letter in the parent’s own words.

That second one is the feature I’d bet your clients talk about at their next dinner party.

It’s Your Brand, Not BillWill’s

Worth knowing before you picture another third-party logo sitting between you and your client: the adviser portal is white-labelled.

Your branding, your name, your setup, at no extra cost. Clients experience it as something you built for them, not a tool you bolted on.

What This Actually Does For Your Business

This is the part I want you to sit with, because it’s easy to file this under a “nice thing to give clients” and move on. It’s more than that.

It’s a retention play with the next generation.

Research Colin shared at the Summit suggests 60% to 80% of clients’ adult kids move to a different adviser once the money changes hands, not because you did anything wrong, but because you’re a stranger to them by then. A legacy service is a genuine, non-awkward reason to meet the executor, the guardians, the kids, years before that transition ever happens.

It’s a fee conversation, solved years in advance.

Think about where most of your longer-term clients sit right now. The big work is done. The structures are set, the insurance is in place, the plan is running quietly in the background. That’s exactly when a client is most likely to ask what they’re still paying you for. A legacy plan that updates every year is a real, tangible answer, not a vague one about “ongoing advice.”

It keeps your review meetings interesting.

You know the feeling when a review starts to feel like the same conversation on repeat. This gives you something genuinely new to bring to the table, a fresh reason for the client to lean in instead of switching off. (Want more ideas for awesome review meetings? Read my article 12 Easy Wows for an Epic Client Review Experience).

It’s a reason to come back every year.

Circumstances change. A guardian moves overseas, a password manager changes, a new asset shows up. Revisiting and updating the plan annually becomes a natural, expected part of your relationship, and a relationship a client revisits every year with you is a relationship they don’t leave.

The Problem With Building This Yourself

A number of you are already doing a rougher version of this inside My Prosperity or a similar portal. I built one myself 15 years ago, back when we called it “Information That Matters.” Good instinct. Here’s where it usually gets stuck.

It becomes one more hat you wear.

Someone has to chase clients for documents and keep the folder current. If that someone is you, it won’t stay consistent.

It stops at the folder.

The best-built vault still just stores information. When a client dies, someone still has to make every call to close an account or cancel a subscription. Usually the family. Usually while grieving.

It’s another login.

Dedicated tools do this well too, but they start around $300 a month, on top of everything else your team already juggles.

What It Costs

No subscription. You pay BillWill $350 once per client, and you decide what, if anything, you charge them. XPlan integration is coming, so nothing needs rekeying.

On security: BillWill connects to accounts via open banking and never holds a password. It records where the password manager lives, not the keys themselves.

SOC 2 certification is in progress, which is a stronger answer than most of us can currently give about the sticky notes and email attachments this information is probably sitting in right now.

How to Bring It Up

Don’t call it estate planning. It’s the fastest way to make a client’s eyes glaze over.

Try this in your next review instead:

“Most of our clients tell us one of their biggest worries isn’t just their own finances, but making sure their family wouldn’t be left in a mess if something happened to them. That’s why we’ve introduced a family emergency plan, a simple, secure way to make sure your executor or your family can find what they need, when they need it most.”

Your Next Step

Take one small step to get started.

Set up BillWill for yourself or your parents so you can experience the process firsthand.

Then create a simple plan for offering it to your clients:

• Choose a name for your service that feels more engaging than “estate planning”– something like The Peace of Mind Plan.

• Decide who in your business will own the setup and follow-up process, because it shouldn’t be you chasing every client for their documents.

• Start with one client – or invite a small pilot group to try the service. Let them know you’re rolling out something new and would value their feedback. Not only will their input help you refine the process, but they’ll also feel special being among the first clients selected.

You don’t need to have the entire service perfectly mapped out before you begin.

Progress comes from taking the first small step.

P.S. Want more ways to create ongoing service with the wow-factor – the kind where you and your clients both feel genuinely good about the fee they’re paying? That’s exactly what we work through inside the Financial Adviser Scale Squad, my weekly coaching program and community for Australian financial advisers. Book your free 15-minute Scale Session today.