Lineage/About
Why we’re building this
Wealth doesn’t get lost. It gets disconnected.
A pension from a job three employers ago. An account in a country you left. A policy in a drawer, a holding nobody else in the family knows exists. Every country with a developed financial system has the same problem, at a scale its own government measures and publishes.
The same failure, everywhere
Different registries. Identical story.
It is tempting to read these numbers as a story about careless people. They are not. They are what happens when nobody, anywhere, is holding the whole picture — and when the most complete version of it gets assembled once a year, under deadline, and then thrown away.
Every figure below comes from the country’s own regulator, statistics office or the research house that produced the study. We have deliberately not added them together: each register measures different assets over different dormancy periods, and a single global total would be false precision.
Americans have unclaimed property sitting with a state treasurer — around $70 billion in total, of which only about 5% is reclaimed each year.
NAUPA ↗Sits in 31.9 million forgotten workplace retirement accounts in the US alone. The average forgotten balance is $66,691.
Capitalize ↗Held in 3.3 million lost UK pension pots — a figure that has grown by roughly 60% since 2018 as people change jobs more often.
ABI ↗Of US adults have never made a will. Only 32% have — and most who do leave it until their seventies.
Pew Research ↗People now live outside the country they were born in, nearly double the 1990 figure. Holding assets in more than one system is no longer unusual.
UN DESA ↗Expected to pass to heirs over the next two decades — the largest handover of wealth in history, from families who mostly have no plan for it.
Cerulli ↗Estimates for the wealth transfer vary widely between research houses — we quote the conservative end of a range that runs far higher. The full country-by-country picture →
What we noticed
The paperwork was never the slow part.
It is easy to assume the courts are the bottleneck. In England and Wales they are no longer: across 242,821 probate applications in 2025, the mean time from application to grant was five weeks, and the median was two.
The delay sits earlier, and nobody measures it — in the months a family spends working out what the person actually owned, which institutions held it, and where the documents that prove it are.
That part is not a legal problem. It is a record-keeping problem, and it is the one nobody has built for.
Mean time from probate application to grant in England and Wales, 2025. The formal process is fast and getting faster.
Reconstructing what was owned, from statements, portals and drawers. Unmeasured, because nobody is responsible for it.
The holding no one knew existed does not enter the estate at all. It becomes a line in a government register instead.
Who this has always been for
Governance has been rationed by wealth.
The apparatus that solves this already exists. It is called a family office: a permanent team holding the whole balance sheet, running the structural checks, keeping the record current. Industry practice puts a dedicated one at somewhere north of $100 million in assets, with multi-family arrangements serving from roughly $25 million.
Below that line, families are sold products rather than given governance. A tracker, a policy, a fund, a filing service — each solving a slice, none holding the whole.
People who build systems for wealth have always built them for people who already have it. This one is for the years while you are still building.
Our approach
Four things, in this order.
Each one depends on the one before it. A will that distributes assets nobody can find is a document that creates work rather than preventing it. How it works in practice.
See what the family actually owns
Every asset across every institution in one place: brokerage and custody, funds, insurance, property, metal, deposits, business stakes, equity compensation, pensions and holdings abroad — with the liabilities sitting against them rather than in a footnote. Every asset class we handle.
Hold the documents and the permissions
An encrypted vault for wills, nominations and policy documents. Family roles and scoped, time-bound permissions so the right people see the right things — and nobody keeps access they should have lost. The security model.
Make the handover survivable
Beneficiary coverage, name mismatches, discoverability and single points of failure — found while each is still a five-minute fix rather than a contested estate. What gets checked.
Bring in someone qualified, on your terms
Verified accountants, advisers and estate planners who work inside your family’s picture instead of chasing you for attachments. They are paid by you; we take no cut and never sit between you. The advisor side.
One engine, local rules
Global by construction, not by translation.
Tax and succession law are stubbornly local, and the details are exactly where families get hurt. So the platform is one engine with country rules layered on top: the picture, the proof, the permissions and the governance checks are identical wherever you are, and only the legal logic changes.
That was the founding assumption, not a later release. In 2024 alone, tax authorities automatically exchanged information on 171 million financial accounts worth close to €13 trillion, across 116 jurisdictions. Cross-border is simply what ordinary families now look like. How that works.
Depth where it counts
In India that means HUF structures, the Hindu Succession Act, Muslim Personal Law and the Indian Succession Act, ancestral versus self-acquired property, and nominee-versus-heir behaving differently at a bank, a depository, an insurer and a registrar.
The same depth, elsewhere
Intestacy rules, probate and grant procedure, spousal entitlements, trust structures and beneficiary designations differ in every jurisdiction we open. The engine underneath does not.
Families that straddle both
Assets in one country, residence in another, parents in a third. One household picture, each holding in the currency it is actually held in, and each obligation recorded where it has to be disclosed.
Governance sounds like something you do after you’ve arrived.
It’s what
gets you there intact.
Who is behind this
Two decades each of building compliance into data products.
Banking, media, travel, observability — industries where compliance is built in rather than bolted on afterwards. Now applied to the families and small firms that never had that muscle.
We started this because we had lived the problem: the accounts nobody could find, the policy discovered too late, the conversation nobody had. Questions, or want to talk? Write to contact@lineage.money. A person answers.
Twenty years-plus consulting and building data products across media, travel, banking-adjacent systems and the observability stack.
Consulting: TiVo · JioCinema · Azentio
Twenty years-plus across global consulting and enterprise software, building and delivering regulated, large-scale data platforms.
Plus enterprise consulting across sectors
Sources
- National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, What is unclaimed property? . US state treasurers hold roughly $70bn belonging to an estimated 1 in 7 Americans. About 5% is claimed each year.
- Capitalize, The True Cost of Forgotten 401(k) Accounts , 2025. 31.9 million left-behind 401(k) accounts holding $2.1 trillion, average balance $66,691.
- Association of British Insurers, Brits missing £31.1bn in unclaimed pension pots , October 2024. 3.3 million lost pots, up around 60% since 2018.
- Pew Research Center, Experiences with estate planning and discussing end-of-life preferences , November 2025. 32% of US adults have made a will. Survey of 8,750 adults, September 2025.
- Money and Pensions Service (UK), Over half of UK adults don’t have a will , 2025.
- United Nations DESA, Population Division, International Migrant Stock 2024: key facts and figures , January 2025. 304 million international migrants in 2024, up from 154 million in 1990.
- Cerulli Associates, Cerulli anticipates $124 trillion in wealth will transfer through 2048 , December 2024. Estimates across research houses vary widely; some put the figure far lower. Treated here as "$100 trillion and up".
- UK Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics Quarterly: October to December 2025 , 2025. 242,821 probate applications in 2025; mean 5 weeks from application to grant, median 2 weeks.
- OECD Global Forum, Peer Review of the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information, 2025 update , 2025. 116 jurisdictions exchanging, 127 committed. In 2024 alone, information on 171 million financial accounts worth nearly EUR 13 trillion was exchanged automatically.
- Reserve Bank of India / IEPF Authority, Unclaimed deposits and the Investor Education and Protection Fund . Combined unclaimed deposits, shares, dividends and insurance in India exceed ₹78,000 crore across RBI, IEPF, IRDAI, AMFI and EPFO disclosures.
For the avoidance of doubt
Several companies are called Lineage. This is the one that isn’t.
Lineage Money is software for family wealth governance: it builds a household balance sheet from the documents a family already receives, reconciles every figure against its source, and runs beneficiary, discoverability and cross-border checks against it.
Lineage Money Private Limited, CIN U66190KA2026PTC220443, registered in Bengaluru, India. Always the two-word form — Lineage Money — because the single word belongs to other people.
| Also called Lineage | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| Lineage, Inc. (NASDAQ: LINE) | Temperature-controlled warehousing and logistics. No relationship. |
| Lineage Financial Network | Rental property finance. No relationship. |
| Lineage Wealth Management | A separate advisory firm. No relationship. |
| Lineage Family Office | A separate advisory firm. No relationship. |
Lineage Money is also not a bank, an investment adviser, a mutual fund distributor or an insurance broker. The full regulatory position.
Join us
If any of this sounds familiar.
Bring in what you already have and watch the picture fill in. Or, if you advise families for a living, come and build your practice on top of it.
Free to start. No card. Bring your advisor in whenever you’re ready.