Estates have acquired a new asset class that the Succession Act never imagined: exchange accounts and wallets, online banks and brokerages with no branch and no post, revenue-earning accounts on platforms, domain names and the like, and the ordinary digital residue, email, photographs, subscriptions, that families care about beyond its value. The law treats digital property as property; the practical problem is that it is property behind authentication designed to keep everyone out, including executors.
Finding what exists
The first difficulty is inventory: digital assets generate no envelopes. The administration's net is correspondence of the old kind where it exists, bank statements showing transfers to exchanges or platforms, the deceased's devices and email where lawful access can be arranged, and family knowledge. An estate cannot administer what it never finds, and holdings that surface years later reopen closed accounts, which is an argument for asking the digital question systematically in every administration rather than only where the deceased was young.
Getting access
Each category has its own gatekeeper. Regulated institutions and mainstream platforms have deceased-account procedures that respond to the grant and certified documents, at varying speeds and with varying grace. Self-custodied cryptocurrency is the hard edge: without the keys or seed phrase there is frequently no institution to serve papers on and no recovery at all, and holdings whose existence is provable but whose keys are lost may have to be treated in the estate as irrecoverable. The valuation and reporting of volatile digital holdings in the SA.2, and their tax treatment, are matters on which specialist tax advice should be obtained.
The planning answer
For the living the fix is cheap and immediate: an inventory of digital assets and where they live, maintained alongside the will, with access arrangements, password manager emergency access, secure storage of seed phrases, designed so that executors can reach what they will lawfully own without anything sensitive sitting in the will itself, which becomes a public document on probate. Wills can helpfully confirm the executors' authority over digital assets in terms platforms recognise. Ten minutes of recording now spares an administration months of digital archaeology later, and this practice now raises the question in every will instruction as standard.
This article is general information, not legal advice. For the full practice area, see Estate Administration, or contact the practice to discuss a matter in confidence.