Digital life after death

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Our digital lives are as complicated and cumbersome as the lives we live in the real world, but most of still never make any plans about our digital assets before death. So what happens to our multiple emails accounts, our social networking assets, our financial assets and transactions after death — is a series of cumbersome problems for the families left behind.

Each digital entity has a complicated system on how to give access to heirs or nominated persons after someone’s death.
Indian-born couple Komal Joshi and Anand Ramdeo, both London-based IT consultants, decided to set up Planneddepar-ture.com, which helps people keep track of their digital assets and plan for their disposal after death, having faced complications after Komal’s father passed away suddenly in 2010.
“Although he was a very organised man and had kept a lot of papers together, we found it difficult to find details of his various bank accounts, of insurance policies. It was difficult, but we realised that we had it easy since we were in a small town in India where everyone knows the other person,” says the 33-year-old, who is pursuing MBA at the London Business School.
The impetus for the business, says Komal, “came from our worry about what would happen to our assets, digital and financial, as we lived in London and none of our families knew anything about those aspects of our lives.”
“We realised there was an information asymmetry, especially in the lives of non-resident Indians,” says Komal, who also looks after business development. Her husband Anand Ramdeo, 35, looks after the technical aspects of the business.
“We have plans to provide specialised services for NRIs and are looking to expand in India.”
The website, which provides people a chance to list their digital assets and keep track of their passwords and pins, has system for separate beneficiaries for each asset and allows users to list a number of verifiers who will confirm to the firm whether the user is alive or passes away after a period of inactivity digitally. “We are also planning to partner with legal firms so that they can help people to create digital assets wills.”
The business just has free subscribers at present, but Komal and Anand plan to start making money from the business by 2014 and then breaking even and going into profit by 2016.
Declining to reveal the money that they have spent on developing the business, Komal says making money is not the only target, but achieving dreams is and that is what she and Anand are working towards.