Interview with Brad Kotansky

Gary Barg: I love the name, Onist – why did you start it and how did you come up with the name?

Brad Kotansky: We kept coming down to the same topic: Honesty. Whether advisors working with clients, giving them honest advice, having honest conversation, and not just selling them products, or family members having honest conversation with each other about finances. Unfortunately, the name Honest was already taken by Jessica Alba, so I opened the dictionary and the first thing that popped up was the pronunciation for Honest, is on-ist. It just clicked for me. 

It all started from a personal need. I am very close with my parents. Eight years ago, my father started to have a cognitive decline. It's hard to see a family member go through that phase, especially since I didn’t live in the same city. My parents live in Montreal and that is where I grew up. I was living in New York at the time, working on Wall Street and it presented all sorts of challenges. 

My parents lived in a three-story house and for my father, that wasn’t possible any more. It was somewhere they had lived for forty years and how do you leave and how do you have the conversation around it?  But it also came down to the finances.  That was a huge problem. Firstly, my father was the one responsible for the family finances. My mother had other responsibilities, equally important, but different and they didn’t talk about that stuff. The burden fell on me. 

I moved to Scottsdale from New York in 2014. My son befriended a kid in his class whose father was the top neurosurgeon at a hospital here. When my parents came to visit me for the first time, I couldn’t see them that first night, because I was at an event for this hospital and I met my friend’s son’s dad-the doctor. I told him my dad’s symptoms when I finished, he looked at me and said, “I want to meet your father tomorrow morning and do an MRI.” 

Dad had an MRI and that night and the doctor showed me the results on his computer and said, “Your dad doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. There is no atrophy of the brain outside of what is normal for a gentleman of his age (which was the early 80s.)” He said he had something called NPH neuro hydrocephalus, which is fluid buildup in the brain and it's reversible through a simple 30-minute procedure. Two hours after the procedures, dad looked at me and said, “Brad, how are the markets?”  I hadn’t been able to talk with him for the past three years.

So, through my own experiences, I decided to start a company to help solve that problem and start connecting families to their financial data and documents so that they can be prepared for unknown events and end of life planning. 

Gary Barg: Let’s just jump into it, what is Onist and what does it do?

Brad Kotansky: To have a plan, two things need to happen. You need to be organized and you need to have access to information. And information is not just financial data. My mother didn’t know where the bank account and credit cards were. She didn’t know the accountant and lawyer that were working for them personally. She didn’t know about the professionals that were working on my dad’s business. She knew nothing about their financial life. She didn’t have access to the will. She didn’t know if there was a Power of Attorney. The life insurance existed, but no one knew where the policy was. 

My dad had done some great things about being organized and having a successful business, but no one knew these details but him. So, just getting other people access to that information is key. The sadness of losing a partner compounded by the mess of unraveling the finances is excruciating and there are tens of millions of people around the world and millions in the United States that go through that every year. 

Onist allows you to start organizing the information in your life. The people that are involved professionally, key documents that are needed, life insurance, whatever is relevant, even life and legacy stuff that is important for the family. It allows for linking of financial information. So the individual, whether it's the adult child who is using it to get involved with their parents’ lives, or one of the parents using it for their own life –  can link accounts, monitor their spending and get all their balances updated in real time. 

The final portion is collaboration, with permission-based access to the people that need it most. If you talk about key documents, the spouse needs to have it. Giving the people that need access, like most family members and the professionals that they work with, is the key portion or the final piece of the puzzle that is extremely important for our users. 

We originally built this for the consumer. What is interesting to us is we’ve had hundreds of professionals come up to us and say, “Hey, I have an aging client base and I am worried that they are not organized. I want to give them a solution to help them get organized, so that they can help me plan with them and for their family.” That is essentially what our prod

uct does today. We have an extensive product roadmap that comes from suggestions from our users. I am now able to manage my parents’ finances from afar, because it's digital and you don’t have to be local anymore. I would love to know if my parent’s credit card balances have been going up for several months or if bills aren’t getting paid. So, Onist is morphing into something bigger. But on day one, it's digital records of financial data documents and permissions for other people to see it. 

Gary Barg: What’s the most interesting responses that your users have been saying to you?

Brad Kotansky: For me, this should have been a walk in the park. Finances is my background; numbers are very simple for me and yet it took me three years to get my dad’s life organized. And I am finding that the messages that we get are that the users have been looking for a solution exactly like this. We are not selling user data, like Facebook and Google does. Our best stories are from the adult children that are acting as the caregivers and they say “Between my kids that I am dealing with, my job, the stressors on my daily life, and the responsibility I have for my parents, you guys have solved such a major pain point and you’ve given me hours back from my weeks and my months.” That is extremely important. 

Gary Barg: This is very much my story. My dad was a professional man, a CEO of a major corporation. His illness came on quickly and when I came back down to Miami to help, he had his own system. Again, mom did a wonderful amount of tremendous things in their relationship, but finances were his. It took weeks to unravel his system, so we could support him and the first things you need to know about – which insurance, where are the Wills, are there any benefits from the VA, what accounts do you have, what needs to be paid? So you answer that in one easy place.

Brad Kotansky: We have a button that says, “manage my parents’ finances.”  

At the time, we were hoping that people would click on it because it's a real pain point for me and the statistics say the same thing for the tens of millions of caregivers in the United States. Low and behold, it happened and that’s the most incredible part of it; people are coming in and their managing their own household’s finances like I am doing with my wife and the same thing for managing my parents’ finances, it's really satisfying. 

Gary Barg: How do we get Onist? Which can actually be taken in so many different ways, but how do we get Onist?

Brad Kotansky: Go to our website; www.onist.com, that’s O-N-I-S-T and you can sign up right there. We also have extensive customer support, so any questions that you have, there is a support button on the website and in the application, and we usually get back to people within 24 hours by email and we have phone support as well. 

Gary Barg: What would be the one most important piece of advice you would like to share with the family caregivers?

Brad Kotansky: Caregiving is about having conversations with your parents and understanding what they have, because when you don’t have that conversation and you are not prepared for emergencies, the stress and problems get multiplied by factors.  So, just having conversations like – “Hey, have you thought about end of life planning?” Do you have a will? Is there a Power of Attorney that exists? What happens, God forbid, if someone gets sick” – are extremely important.  Just start that conversation early, making sure that husband and wife are talking about it. And, of course, the advisors and adult children. One thing that Onist does is it allows for granular sharing. You don’t have to share everything, you can just share parts of information that are relevant at that stage.

Starting the conversation to understand where a family sits from an end of life planning and financial perspective is the best thing that you can do to lessen the stress that will most likely come.