Prime mover

STEP has been working to raise awareness of the importance of making plans for one’s digital assets in estate planning, which is an increasingly necessary step that advisors must consider in this ever-evolving digital age.

We first highlighted the importance of digital assets succession planning through our Protect Your Digital Memories campaign, launched in 2022.[1] STEP’s online toolkit offers guidance on securing social media accounts and cloud platforms, including how to update your legacy settings across various platforms. The campaign serves as a reminder that we need to take steps to protect our digital footprint if we want to ensure our loved ones have access to our photos, videos and cloud files upon incapacity or death.

Also stemming from this work came the STEP Digital Legacy Scorecard, which reviews the legacy tools and terms of service policies of ten leading social media platforms and cloud services providers, ranking them from bronze to gold in terms of suitability. Our findings from this work, including the individual ratings of our selected providers, were published in September 2023. These results were stark, showing that all platforms have much work to do in strengthening their legacy tools to allow provisions for nominated persons of a loved one to access their account in the appropriate circumstances.

Open dialogue

Throughout this process, STEP has sought to engage with the various platforms we identified in our legacy scorecard project. Some of these providers, while disappointed in their own ranking (none achieved gold standard), have appreciated the insights provided by STEP and have agreed to address improvements to their terms of service. We have been grateful to open dialogue with both LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) during this process, and we hope to collaborate with these providers individually to seek comprehensive improvements to their platforms.

The challenges of accessing a loved one’s digital information can be even more complicated in the instance of digital financial assets. Cryptocurrency remains a relatively low-regulation area. With the added complexities of passkey requirements and two-factor authentication of crypto accounts, many families may feel they are hitting a brick wall when trying to access the crypto funds left by a beloved member of their family.

STEP’s work in this area so far has focused on awareness, such as highlighting the variations in the digital assets landscape, and has encompassed assets both sentimental and financial. It is clear that cross-border collaboration, as has been achieved in other areas of succession planning, would go some distance in bringing consistent standards to planning for digital assets. The US Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act and EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation reforms will be important developments to observe as the implementation of similar legislation is considered more widely around the globe.

Questions without answers

Although this is important, we do acknowledge that practitioners are extremely limited with regards to tools on digital assets, with little to no guidance at their disposal. The nuances and complexities of crypto-assets in particular continue to pose new challenges and many questions, with few answers in case law and statute books. A range of concerns, including cybersecurity, privacy and operational and market risks, amplified by the fast-paced developments of artificial intelligence, demand that practitioners have the best tools at hand to assist clients. For this reason, we will be continuing our efforts to form collaborative relationships with industry groups to share knowledge and develop guidance tools for STEP members where we can.