Locked Out of a Legacy: The Digital Assets Executors Cannot Reach
Ask an executor to describe an estate and the answer usually follows a well-worn pattern: a house, a pension, a few shareholdings, a current account, perhaps a premium bond or two. The paperwork turns up in a shoebox or, in better-organised families, a lever-arch file. It is a tidy picture, and it is steadily becoming an obsolete one.
A growing share of modern British wealth never appears on a statement pushed through the letterbox. It sits behind a login: a cryptocurrency wallet, an online-only savings account opened during a chase for a better rate, a platform-held investment account, a payment app balance, a peer-to-peer lending portfolio, even a domain name or a small holding of digital collectibles. To the person who owns it, this wealth is entirely legible. To the executor who has never seen the app, it may as well not exist.
The anatomy of an invisible estate
Digital assets tend to fall into four groups, and each fails in a different way.
The first is money in online-only wrappers — savings accounts, cash management services and investment platforms with no branch network and no annual paper statement. Because executors traditionally build an estate picture from post and bank statements, these are the easiest to miss.
The second is crypto-tokens held directly. Here the obstacle is technical rather than administrative: without the seed phrase or private key, the asset is unrecoverable in practice, whatever the legal position says.
The third is custodial accounts — exchange balances, trading apps, crowdfunding positions. These are recoverable in principle, but usually only after the provider has seen a grant of probate and completed its own identity checks, a process that can take months.
The fourth is the long tail: loyalty balances, subscription credit, cloud storage, social media accounts with commercial value, digital businesses and intellectual property. Individually modest, collectively not.
A password is not the same as permission
It is tempting to assume that a written note of login details solves the problem. It rarely does. Supplying an executor with a password does not confer legal authority to use it, and providers are entitled to insist on their own procedures — typically a grant of probate, occasionally a specific court order. Using credentials without the provider's consent can, in principle, engage the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Data protection law does not tidy the matter up either: the UK GDPR does not apply to the personal data of deceased people, but that imposes no obligation on a platform to open an account to a stranger holding a password.
The distinction that matters, then, is between access and authority. Good planning supplies the second and makes the first feasible.
Why probate still presumes paper
Executors are required to identify and value the whole estate. Where assets are overlooked, the failure is not neutral. Distributions made on an incomplete picture leave the executor exposed to claims from beneficiaries who later discover an unclaimed account, and Inheritance Tax returns can be wrong by omission — a problem that becomes more pointed as reporting obligations tighten.
Crypto holdings must be declared at their value on the date of death, and that valuation is not straightforward for assets that trade around the clock and move sharply. Meanwhile the legal status of digital assets is being clarified only gradually. The Law Commission has recommended statutory confirmation that certain digital assets, crypto-tokens among them, can be treated as personal property, which would give them a firmer place in succession law. Until that reform arrives, most estates depend less on legal machinery than on records.
A framework that holds together
1. Build an inventory, not a memoir
List every platform, account and wallet with its purpose and approximate value. Update it annually. Store it where a trusted person can find it, not in a drawer nobody thinks to open.
2. Separate the map from the keys
A password manager with a documented emergency-access route is the cleanest solution for most households; a sealed letter held by a solicitor is a reasonable alternative. Do not place passwords in the will. Once probate is granted, a will becomes a public document.
3. Address digital assets in the will itself
Modern drafting should grant executors express power to deal with digital property, and be accompanied by a letter of wishes identifying the inventory. A letter of wishes is not binding, but it is far better than silence.
4. Treat crypto as a special case
Record where the hardware wallet is kept and how the recovery phrase is secured — ideally split or held by a professional custodian, never emailed to yourself. Keep acquisition records for capital gains purposes, even though death typically triggers a base-cost reset for CGT.
5. Diarise the review
Digital estates rot faster than paper ones. Accounts are closed, providers merge, apps are retired. An annual review alongside the will is the minimum sensible rhythm.
The cost of silence
Where nothing is recorded, the outcome is rarely dramatic — it is simply quiet. An account goes dormant. A provider eventually transfers the balance under dormant assets arrangements, or a wallet sits untouched because the keys died with their owner. The family never learns what was there, so no one can be said to have lost anything specific.
That is precisely why the gap persists. Digital wealth is easy to accumulate and easy to forget, and the estate planning industry has been slow to ask clients the questions that would surface it. The fix is unglamorous: an inventory, a secure access route, a clause in the will and a diary entry. For families with meaningful assets held online, that paperwork may prove more valuable than any single holding it describes.
