Digital Assets in Your Ontario Estate Plan: What Executors Need Access To

A generation ago, an executor could get a fairly complete picture of someone's affairs from paper records and a few bank statements. Today, a meaningful part of most people's lives — financial accounts, photos, communications, even money itself — lives online, often behind a password only the account holder knows. Digital assets raise real, practical problems for Ontario estate plans that don't specifically address them.

This isn't a niche concern anymore. It affects almost every estate, whether or not the person who died thought of themselves as having "digital assets" at all.

What Counts as a Digital Asset

The term covers a wide range of things, including:

Many of these have real financial value; others hold sentimental value that families care about just as much.

Why Executors Get Locked Out

Even where an executor has full legal authority to act for the estate, that authority doesn't automatically translate into practical access. Common obstacles include:

• Passwords and two-factor authentication the deceased never recorded or shared anywhere
• Encryption that makes a device or account genuinely inaccessible without the right credentials
• Platform terms of service that restrict account access to the original account holder and may not recognize an executor's authority the way a bank does
• No physical document to present the way a death certificate works for a bank account — many platforms have no equivalent process at all

The Legal Authority Question

Being named as executor gives you legal authority over the deceased's estate generally, but it doesn't automatically grant technical access to specific online accounts. Because of this gap, it's worth having your will explicitly authorize your executor to access, manage, and, where appropriate, close your digital accounts, rather than assuming general executor authority covers it.

This is also an area where planning ahead matters more than most, since there's often no formal legal process to force access after the fact the way there is for probate and financial institutions.

A Digital Asset Inventory Checklist

• [ ] List major accounts by category: financial, email, social media, cloud storage, cryptocurrency, and business
• [ ] Note whether each account has any real financial value, versus purely sentimental value
• [ ] Decide, for each significant account, whether it should be preserved, transferred, or simply closed
• [ ] Use a password manager, and make sure your executor knows how to access it after your death, not before
• [ ] Confirm your will's language specifically authorizes your executor to deal with digital assets
• [ ] Review and update the inventory periodically, since accounts and passwords change often

What This Means for Cryptocurrency Specifically

Cryptocurrency deserves particular attention because of how unforgiving it is. If the private keys or seed phrase needed to access a cryptocurrency wallet are lost, there is generally no institution to call, no password reset process, and often no way to recover the asset at all. Unlike a bank account, there's no fallback — the asset can simply become permanently inaccessible. Anyone holding meaningful cryptocurrency should treat secure, shareable access instructions as an essential part of their estate plan, not an afterthought.

Frequently asked questions