“A whole bunch of strategies are put in place to capture the customer… There is an abuse of a dominant position,” denounces Matthieu Slisse on the funeral industry.

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the interview above. Click on the video to watch it in full.

Myriam Encaoua: Who are the scavengers? The title you have chosen is extremely strong. He evokes these vultures, which literally come to devour the bodies. Who are these scavengers?

Matthew Slisse : So this book is an investigation of more than a year into the two main funeral companies in France, which organize one ceremony in three. There is a group called OGF and its famous brand, Pompes Funèbres Générales, which is owned by a Canadian investment fund. And the second is Funécap, its Roc Eclerc brand, also owned by two investment funds. They have a dominant position in this market. That is to say that between them, they organize one ceremony in three. There are 4,000 funeral directors in France, but you have two of them who carry out one ceremony in three.

Myriam Encaoua: It’s a moment, death, obviously, when we are very vulnerable, we are incapable of the slightest rationality, of putting companies in competition with each other. This is a time of distress. You say that customers are captive at that point. Captive of what, of whom?

Brianne Huguerre-Cousin : When we lose someone close to us, we are obviously devastated and we have to carry out a whole bunch of tasks that we are really not used to doing, because who is going to think in advance of everything that needs to be done to organize a funeral? We must already alert relatives. You even have to find the clothes that the deceased will wear in his coffin. You have to do a lot of administrative procedures. And it’s something we don’t think about. We, the French, in our society, death is still a taboo.

When you enter the door of a funeral agency, in general, it is the first time that you find yourself confronted with these choices. We don’t know how much money we’re going to spend, we don’t know how much time we have, and we leave ourselves completely to the person who’s going to be in front of us. We cannot do it ourselves since in France, we are not allowed to dig a hole in our home and bury a deceased person anyhow. And besides, fortunately, there are still rules surrounding all that. And so, we are completely obliged to place our trust in the person in front of us. And what we don’t know is that this person, behind it, will have objectives from his hierarchy which will require him to sell a lot of services.

Myriam Encaoua: We discover that it is a market like any other, open to competition and which has a form of industrialization of grief. That’s what’s happening. Behind, you have these famous companies, but there is also training in figures. Is that what you’re talking about?

Brianne Huguerre-Cousin : We discovered with Mathieu, we published it on Friday October 31 in the investigative media Médiacités exclusive documents which were distributed until 2021 by OGF, therefore the Pompes Funèbres Générales box. These are documents in which we see everything that funeral advisors had to do to sell. That is to say that in training, we told them, here are the techniques to transform a “no” into a “yes”. As soon as the customer has an objection, you will do the technique of successive “yes”, for example. So, ask seemingly innocuous questions so that the person answers “yes”, and in fact, psychologically, they will condition themselves to accept and pay something behind.

Laurent Joffrin: If I understood correctly, there were no illegal things that you discovered?

Matthew Slisse : To answer this point, in fact, there is a legal framework in France which is inherited from a 1993 law which was passed by the left which liberalized the funeral sector. And in fact, this law ultimately had two objectives. When it came into force, it was to lower prices, to create transparency with competition. Before it was liberalized, funeral directors were only responsible for the municipalities. That is to say that the communes organized the funerals.

Before the law, municipalities, apart from large cities like Paris, very often chose to delegate the mission to a private actor. In fact, there was a private actor, Pompes Funèbres Générales, which was owned by Lyonnaise des Eaux and which, in fact, what we realized was that behind this municipal monopoly was a private monopoly. So we’re going to break that, we’re going to open up competition. And in fact there, the market is refocusing with these two players and to answer the question of whether what we are saying is illegal. In fact, in this law, it is written that families must have free choice. That’s in the law. And we have described in this book a whole bunch of stratagems, a whole bunch of strategies to try to capture, to orient. That’s really an abuse of a dominant position. That is to say, we are flirting with the limit. And Brianne can tell you in particular about a case where we flirted really close to the limits. This is the case for funeral plans.

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