Accessing Assets in a Will

12th August 2026

Your Will Covers Your Assets. Does Anyone Know How To Access Them?

Estates used to arrive in a box. Bank statements, share certificates, a building society passbook, maybe a bundle of Premium Bond numbers. More and more of them now arrive as a phone that nobody can unlock. That shift has created a quiet problem in estate administration. Knowing what someone owned is not the same as being able to reach it. Wills get written with real care. Access almost never gets written down at all.

How common is this?

More common than most people expect.

Research published by The Investors Centre, drawn from a nationally representative survey of 2,000 UK adults in February 2026, puts some numbers on it:

5% of UK adults now hold financial assets digitally. Trading apps, online ISAs, crypto exchanges and app based savings accounts.
2% of those investors have no documented way for anyone else to reach their accounts.
6% of UK adults have no digital access instructions in a will or estate plan.
Roughly one in three digital investors hold £20,000 or more online with no access route in place.

That last figure is the one that turns up on our desks.

A will says who inherits. It does not say how to get in.

This is the distinction that catches families out. In England and Wales, a will becomes a public document once probate is granted. Anyone can order a copy through the GOV.UK probate search. Passwords and PINs should never go anywhere near it. A lasting power of attorney is a separate matter again. It covers incapacity, not death, and it stops working the moment someone dies. Plenty of people assume one document does both jobs. An executor can prove entitlement to an account and still be locked out. The login sits behind a code generated on a handset nobody can open.

Knowing a password is not the same as being allowed to use it

This is the part most guidance skips. The Law Society has warned that an executor who logs into an account using the deceased’s password may commit an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Most providers also forbid password sharing in their own terms. That sounds unhelpful, but it mainly changes what is worth leaving behind. The proper route is to approach the provider with a death certificate and the grant of probate, and let them release the account. So what your executor needs from you is enough to know the account exists and who to write to. A login is not the goal. There are two exceptions, and both are worth setting up in advance.

What your executors actually need

A list. Nothing more complicated than that. The most useful thing you can leave is a simple inventory of what you hold and where you hold it, kept separately from any passwords.

For each account:

The platform or provider name
The type of account
A rough idea of what sits in it
Who to contact

The first failure is rarely the password. It is that nobody knew the account existed. An executor who does not know a trading account is there will not go looking for it.

The safest ways to pass on access

The first exception is access you authorise yourself, while you are alive. That is a different thing from someone borrowing your password later.

A password manager with emergency access switched on

Just over a fifth of digital investors use a manager. Very few have set up the feature that releases the vault to a nominated person.

A sealed letter of wishes, stored with your will

Your solicitor or accountant can hold it alongside the will rather than inside it. Keep it to where things are, and review it when you review the will.

Apple Legacy Contact and Google Inactive Account Manager

Neither one hands over your bank or trading accounts. What they do is release your phone and email data, which is usually how an executor finds everything else. Apple takes about five minutes to set up. Google runs on a delay you choose, from three to eighteen months.

There is also the phone itself. More than half of digital investors rely on two factor authentication tied to a single handset. One phone, one PIN, and a great deal sits behind it. What does not work: a note in a desk drawer, a spreadsheet called “passwords”, or a list that has not been touched since 2019.

Crypto needs its own plan

Cryptocurrency is the second exception, and the sharpest version of this problem. An account at a registered exchange has a bereavement process. It is slow, and it asks for a lot of paperwork, but the route exists. A self custody wallet has no route at all. There is no provider to write to. If the recovery phrase is lost, the coins are lost with it. That is the design working as intended, not a fault anyone can fix. So write the recovery phrase down, store it somewhere secure and separate from the device, and leave instructions your executor can follow. This is the one asset class where poor planning means the money is gone for good rather than delayed.

Digital assets still count for Inheritance Tax

They form part of the estate like anything else, and they are valued at the date of death.

Parliament settled the ownership question in December 2025. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 confirmed that crypto and similar assets can be personal property in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Ownership is now clear. Access is still down to whatever the account holder left behind. The timing matters too. Inheritance tax usually has to be paid before probate is granted, so an estate can owe tax on assets the executor has not yet been able to reach. Add a volatile valuation and a capital gains record keeping trail, and a small crypto holding can absorb a surprising amount of an executor’s time.