End-of-life planning is essential to secure your loved ones financially after your passing. The difference between financial security and uncertainty often lies in how well you’ve planned, and more importantly, how accessible that plan is when it matters most. 

There are many ways to approach end-of-life planning, but the real test of a good plan lies in its resilience under pressure. Can your loved ones access your information years down the line, in your absence, without you around to authorise it?  

A common method is to store important documents and information on cloud platforms. Unlike physical devices like hard drives or pen drives, cloud storage makes your data device-agnostic, accessible from anywhere, without depending on a specific device. While physical storage offers a sense of control, being offline and therefore secure from online threats, it lacks durability. Devices can be lost, stolen, damaged, or corrupted over time. 

Imagine this: your hard drive contains all your financial details. Twenty years from now, after your passing, your family tries to access it, only to find it unreadable, misplaced, or incompatible with newer systems. That’s why accessibility, not just storage, is at the heart of effective legacy planning.  

Designed for retrieval, not resilience 

In India, DigiLocker, a government-backed platform, is a familiar name. It allows you to pull government records, many digitally signed, and store them securely in the cloud. For daily use, this works well. But long-term legacy planning demands more than just cloud access. In a crisis, your loved ones need reliable, structured, and meaningful access to information, not just a vault of documents. 

Organisation matters: Categorise, don’t just collect 

Any platform used for end-of-life planning needs to make information discoverable. That means: 

• Categorising documents 

• Creating folders and subfolders 

• Labelling clearly by type: investments, insurance, assets, wills, etc. 

DigiLocker doesn’t offer preset folders in the status quo. You can upload and store files, but unless you create your own structure manually, your digital archive may become hard to navigate when it matters most. 

Nominee access 

A key element of legacy planning is access control, who sees what, and when. DigiLocker allows you to designate a single nominee, who receives full access to your account after your passing. But this limits flexibility: 

• You can’t assign specific documents to specific people. 

• You can’t keep certain files private from certain nominees. 

• You can’t plan for layered, multi-person access based on document sensitivity. 

If you want your Term Insurance shared with your parents, but not your spouse, and your Will shared with a lawyer, not family, DigiLocker cannot support that level of nuance. 

Timing matters: Access control when it counts  

One of the most overlooked, yet vital, elements of end-of-life planning is timing. It’s not just who gets access to your information, but when. You may not want to share your will during your lifetime, perhaps to avoid influencing relationships or inviting unintended consequences. At the same time, certain documents, like medical insurance or a living will, might need to be available immediately, especially in a crisis. 

An effective end-of-life platform should allow you to set access conditions for each document, offering full control over when, how, and by whom your information is seen. You should be able to keep sensitive data private until after your passing while ensuring critical files are accessible in real time. 

In some cases, you may also want to grant restricted access, where nominees can view a file but cannot download or print it. This level of discretion can be particularly useful when sharing files with lawyers, financial advisors, or witnesses to your will. 

Currently, DigiLocker does not offer this level of control. Access is only granted after your death, and it applies uniformly to the entire account, without the ability to customise permissions document by document. 

Passwords shouldn’t be the gatekeepers of your legacy  

One of the most fragile links in end-of-life planning is password dependency. Most cloud storage platforms today still rely on a basic, and often brittle, model: your nominee needs your email ID and password to access your information. 

But passwords are not designed for legacy. They are easy to forget, hard to retrieve, and nearly impossible to reset once you’re gone, especially if your mobile device is locked, your number is inactive, or two-factor authentication blocks access entirely. Now imagine your loved ones, grieving and overwhelmed, trying to piece together crucial information without a roadmap, or the keys. 

DigiLocker follows this same model. For a nominee to access your account, they must either: 

• Know your username and password, which may be impossible to locate years later. 

• Or have access to your Aadhaar-linked mobile number, something that may no longer be active after your passing. 

This creates a serious vulnerability. Your legacy, however well documented, could become inaccessible due to a lost password or deactivated phone. 

DigiLocker: A start, but not the finish line  

Any end-of-life planning tool must meet a few non-negotiable standards: it should be technologically robust, always available, and designed to protect your privacy. Unfortunately, DigiLocker often falls short on these counts. 

Users have reported frequent issues, difficulty logging in, especially with Aadhaar-based OTPs, documents failing to fetch, and in some cases, entire files being lost. The platform has undergone several backend changes, which have periodically rendered it unstable or inaccessible. For something as critical as your end-of-life documents, that’s a risk you don’t want to take. 

Moreover, DigiLocker wasn’t built with end-of-life planning in mind. It offers no control over when and how nominees can access information. Access is only granted after death, and even then, it depends on the nominee having credentials or access to your Aadhaar-linked phone, neither of which may be available years down the line. 

And then there’s the trust factor. Being a government-backed platform, DigiLocker has faced questions about how data privacy is handled and who might have access to your stored documents. 

WALLT: A comprehensive end-of-life planning solution  

Recognizing the lack of any comprehensive end-of-life planning solution in India, WALLT was developed as a dedicated end-of-life planning platform, designed to address the unique needs of this important process. WALLT is not just a storage space, it’s a purpose-built end-of-life planning platform. Every element of WALLT has been designed to solve the challenges that traditional cloud storage and other platforms cannot. 

Your data is protected with end-to-end encryption, both in transit and at rest. WALLT can’t read or share your documents, not even under external pressure. It’s privacy by design, and by default. 

The platform allows you to import data (even from DigiLocker in beta), categorise it with folders and tags, and assign multiple nominees per document. You can control when each nominee gets access, immediately, after a certain event, or only after death. You can even restrict file downloads or prints, ideal for sharing with professionals like lawyers or accountants. 

Most importantly, WALLT removes the need for your nominee to ever have your email ID, password, or Aadhaar-linked phone. That’s a critical safeguard. WALLT offers a complete, secure, and structured approach to end-of-life planning. You can explore it here.