What is asset management?

Asset management is the management of a client's portfolio of assets with the goal of increasing the assets’ value.

Usually, asset management is associated with high-net-worth individuals, who hire an asset management company to develop an individual investment strategy for them. A financial services company can be the most cost-effective way to manage one’s portfolio.

There is one subtle but very important aspect of an asset management system – the protection of the assets.

Asset protection aims at applying various financial, technical, and legal means to protect your assets.

Why is that so important? Because there is one fundamental difference between the applicability of asset management and asset protection.

As we already noted, asset management is usually used by high-net-worth individuals. Asset protection, on the other hand, can be used by anyone, and in reality, it is way more important for people with fewer assets than for rich people. Why is that? Because failing to claim a $100K inherited asset such as life insurance or a bank account might be a small issue for a wealthy family, but it might have huge importance for other families.

Many people assume that because asset management is for wealthy people, the same applies also to asset protection. As we saw, in reality, it is exactly the opposite.

Asset protection – the neglected side of asset management

In a very practical sense, asset protection includes these basic steps:

cataloging your assets in a secure environment
With your nominated assets
tracking your assets
applying technical, financial, legal or other means to protect your assets in the event of anything unforeseen happening

Most asset management tools aim at protecting the long-term asset value – insuring your real estate, establishing a trust, etc. Almost none of the existing asset protection tools, though, aim at protecting asset ownership.

Traditional asset protection tools focus on protecting the value of the asset, not the ownership.

And most importantly, they fail to cover against some very important internal risks:

These options would fall short if something were to happen to you AND your partner together.
The people with whom you share the information about your assets might forget how to access it. Or they might be too young or too old to remember the access instructions.
And most importantly, they don’t give you the option to allow access ONLY if something happens to you, not before.

Why asset protection is critical for you and your family

No matter how meticulous your financial planning, will your family members be aware of your life insurance, pension fund or bank account? This question becomes especially important if you meet any of the criteria below:

You have multiple types of assets:

life insurance, bank accounts, stock options, company stocks, investment in hedge funds and mutual funds, private equity, cryptocurrencies, real estate, to list a few. This increases the complexity of asset tracking for the owner, and especially for the beneficiaries.

Your assets reside in more than one country.

This situation is particularly familiar to expats. When they move from country to country, they usually leave a bank account here, life insurance or a pension fund there. This further complicates the asset tracking and, as a result, increases the need for asset protection.

Your family members live in a country different from the country where your assets are stored.

For example, you live in the US and your assets are there, but your family members are in South America, Europe or Asia. This makes the asset identification and location especially challenging for family members.

How big is the problem?

The famous Californian attorney James L. Cunningham, Jr. puts it well in his book Savvy Estate Planning: “According to CBS News, about $1 billion in life insurance claims goes unpaid every year. That’s because even though the insurance company knows you are dead, they have no affirmative obligation to reach out and pay the money to your beneficiaries. The beneficiary has to submit a claim, but if the beneficiary doesn’t know about the policy, that claim will never be submitted. The insurance company knows you have passed, they know who the beneficiary is, but if no one steps forward, the company holds on to the money. I find this shocking.”

$1 billion per year just in the US and only for life insurances. How big is the problem of protecting all types of assets from these risks? As you can see, it’s huge. As of 2020, so-called unclaimed assets approach $100B in the US alone. Latest reports for the UK show £77B. Globally, we are talking about trillions of dollars. And the upward trend is alarming – a $5B increase per year just in the USA.

New York Times “There Are Billions in Unclaimed Assets Out There. Some Could Be Yours.” Government agencies have tens of billions of dollars’ worth of bank accounts, insurance policies and other forgotten holdings.

CNN “$58 billion unclaimed: Is some of it yours?” “Unclaimed property comes from a variety of sources, including abandoned bank accounts and stock holdings, unclaimed life insurance payouts and forgotten pension benefits.”

How does DGLegacy’s asset protection work?

With the DGLegacy application, you can protect your personal assets against unforeseen events. You can connect your preferred beneficiary with your preferred assets, at the time you choose – while ensuring they get the support they need in the process of claiming.

This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:

Are aware of your assets
Can identify and locate your assets
Can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.

This is achieved with the following easy steps:

Catalog assets

Assign beneficiaries and trustees

Heartbeat protocol

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

Support for your loved ones

Catalog assets

You catalog the assets that you want to protect via DGLegacy, providing the minimum basic information about the assets that will allow your beneficiaries to identify and locate them.

DGLegacy doesn’t ask for confidential information such as your bank account number, the value of your stock options, or financial account numbers!

Next step

Assign beneficiaries and trustees

Beneficiaries are the people whom you appoint to be informed about the assets that you assign to them. These are usually your partner, your children or your extended family members, such as siblings and parents.

You might not want to share your asset information with your beneficiaries just yet. No problem. You can choose whether they are to be notified at the time you create the asset or only in the case of an unforeseen event.

If your beneficiaries are, for example, elderly people or children, they might not be proficient with the type of assets assigned to them. In that case, you can assign trustees for each of your assets in the DGLegacy application. If anything happens to you, they can help the beneficiaries to locate their assigned assets and claim ownership.

Next step

Configure your Heartbeat protocol

The custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol of DGLegacy verifies that you are OK and detects whether anything unforeseen has happened to you.

It is a safe procedure which also aims to eliminate the possibility of false detections of unforeseen events. This is implemented through a multistep process, described on the How It Works page.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

If there is no confirmation in response to any of the reminder emails or phone calls, the system detects that an unforeseen event has happened to you.

Then the notifications which you have configured into the system about the cataloged assets and the associated beneficiaries and trustees are triggered.

Next step

Support for your loved ones

Our ultimate goal is to provide you with the right service to protect your assets and secure your loved ones’ inheritance.

Our team of experts worked with a renowned law firm to offer additional protection for your loved ones through the legal package “Guide and Inform”, part of the Platinum subscription.

In the case of an unforeseen event, the law company will engage with the beneficiaries to guide and help them in the process of claiming the assets you’ve assigned to them.

DGLegacy is great for protecting my assets and my family. So far I was storing my assets’ information on a google sheet shared with my wife, but I always worried that my assets will be lost if …

Victor

Strategic Alliances Manager - dmarcian

This is a service that could make you sleep well in a time of crisis. Knowing your family is sorted out and you have every valuable under control is priceless.

Vlad

Senior Engineering Manager - VMware

Atlanta, Georgia, United States.

Finally a peace of mind. I always wanted a tool where I could see a snapshot of my assets, track them, and decide what to share, with whom and when.
Because my assets were stored in different systems …

Ingrid Henke

Founder - ARRIVA relocation services

Berlin, Germany.

Knowing that DGLegacy exists is such a relief! Up till now, I’ve put my head in the sand when it came to thinking about my assets because it was so stressful with no real solution in sight. I ca…

Alara Vural

Founder - Alara Vural Coaching

London, UK.

I have been using a secure vault and password manager for years but I always worried that my family won’t be aware of most of this information if they need it. I really like that DGLegacy combines p…

Agnieszka Michalik

Software Architect - HERE Technologies

Berlin, Germany

DGLegacy enables me to easily track and organize all my passwords and assets.
The most important thing is that the digital inheritance capability of the service ensures that loved ones will be informe…

Stella Schmitz

International HR Executive