GOAL
Determine Cake's competitors and provide details on Cake's services as well as the legal effect of the wills and other end-of-life documents provided by Cake. In addition, determine the possibility of the executioner tampering with the legal will of the deceased and the security of Cake's platform to prevent the tampering of end-of-life documents.
Early Findings
- Companies doing business similar to Cake include Everplans, Yourefolio, and Afternote.
- Cake's service allows people to document and share all their health, legal, funeral and legacy decisions in an end-of-life plan that is stored and secured digitally.
- Cake helps prepare people to create a will by asking important questions to get the person thinking about their dependents and all the assets they would need to protect so they can have a more productive session with their estate attorney. Their goal is to get their customer to create a comprehensive will with an attorney in their state that is legally binding and then upload such document in their Cake account.
- Some states like New York only recognize original hard copies of a will signed by the person, so Cake emphasizes the need to create a will with an estate attorney in the person's state that is legally binding.
- Documents stored on Cake are quite secure as they employ bank-level encryption security for all stored data and the "data is protected in transit and at rest with 256-bit AES encryption and 2048-bit certificates."
- For legally binding documents, Cake serves mainly as a digital store of the document and the original hard copy document is most likely still stored with the person's attorney. Hence, falsification of the digital will by the executioner is unlikely to be effective for legally binding documents as the original hardcopy of the document with the person's attorney would remain unaffected.
Proposed Next Steps
We recommend proceeding to provide a detailed competitive analysis of the three companies identified above providing similar services to Cake in this competitive landscape spreadsheet. In addition, we will include a thorough analysis of Cake that will provide a deep dive on its services, the security of its platform, the legal effect of documents stored on the platform, as well as the possibility of the executioner tampering with digital legal documents. (6 hours, $150).