For decades, estate planning has focused on who inherits. In this article James Martin suggests the challenge in 2026 is helping executors discover what there is to inherit in the first place as paper trails disappear and financial lives become fragmented across pensions, platforms, savings accounts and digital records. He contends families and professionals are now spending months piecing together estates that should be straightforward to administer and it is the responsibility of professionals help clients leave behind not just instructions, but a clear map of their wealth.
I want to describe an estate, because I suspect most people reading this have administered one like it, or watched a client’s family try to. The will was fine. It had been drafted by a firm that knew what it was doing, executed properly, and it named the deceased’s eldest daughter as executor. She was capable and organised and had a full-time job. What she did not have was any idea where her father had kept his money. She had a shoebox of letters going back to 2011, a memory that he had once mentioned a pension from a job in Coventry, and a laptop that asked for a password nobody knew.
She spent the best part of four months writing to companies to ask whether they held anything in his name. Some of them did. One had been taken over twice since the letter in the shoebox and took eleven weeks to confirm there was a policy. By the time she had a full picture she had used most of her annual leave and had stopped speaking to the firm that drafted the will, not because they had done anything wrong but because every call cost money and none of it helped her find anything.
Nothing about that estate was unusual, and that is the point I want to make. The will did its job. The problem was never who should inherit. It was where the assets were, and the will had never been designed to answer that.
The numbers around this are large enough that it is worth pausing on them. The Pensions Policy Institute put the value of lost pension pots in the UK at £31.1 billion in its Briefing Note 138 last October, across 3.3 million pots. That is pensions only. There is no equivalent figure for platform accounts, dormant savings, old life policies or anything held digitally, and there never will be, because the whole difficulty is that nobody knows they exist.
CEBR’s work for Kings Court Trust estimated close to £1 trillion passing between UK generations in the decade to 2027, with the annual figure rising to £335 billion a year by 2047. A lot of that money sits with people who were told for thirty years to go paperless and did. Their children are now the executors, and the shoebox is empty.
For a long time this sat with the family and nobody else. I think that is changing.
Part of it is regulatory. The FCA announced in May a review of how firms that advise on, manage or administer investments deal with bereaved customers, and its own research found that only 47% of bereaved customers felt they got the support they needed. That review is pointed at platforms and wealth managers, not at will writers. But it sets a public benchmark for what bereavement support ought to look like, and families will measure everyone against it, including the firm whose name is on the will.
So what does a firm actually do about this? Less than you might think, and none of it involves a new service that takes time or effort away from what they do best.
The most useful change is at instruction. Most firms take a picture of the estate at instruction for tax and drafting purposes, and then it goes in the file, written for nobody in particular and rarely updated. If the same appointment produced a plain list of institutions, not values, just names, the pension providers, the platform, the bank, the insurer, written with the executor as its reader, most of the four months (or more) I described would not happen. Most clients can produce this in the time it takes to make a coffee. Their executors cannot produce it at all.
The second is to decide, with the client, where that list lives and how it reaches the executor. The version that works has three properties. The client holds it and can update it without booking an appointment, so it stays current. It names the person who is allowed to open it. And it releases to that person on death without the firm having to be the gatekeeper, because the firm is not always the first call a family makes. A document in a drawer meets none of those. A copy held with the will meets one. A record kept by the client that names the executor and passes to them automatically meets all three, and that is the standard I would hold any method to, whether it is a service like Inherit Vault, a shared file, or something the firm builds itself.
The third is to treat that list as part of the will review. A review that checks the executors and the residuary gift but not where the assets now sit has left the hardest question for the worst moment. Providers merge, accounts move, and the client who consolidated three pensions last year has made last year’s list wrong and likely not even thought about it.
None of this is new to the profession. What has changed is the volume, the fragmentation, and the fact that the paper trail people used to leave by accident no longer exists. A will that says who inherits is necessary. It is not, on its own, enough for the person who has to carry it out.
About the author
James Martin is founder and chief technology officer of Inherit Vault, a UK service that lets people record where their assets are held and release that record to named executors on death. He writes on estate administration and digital legacy.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Today’s Wills and Probate.
