Lineage/Governance
The part people skip
Everything here is fixable this afternoon.
None of these checks is about dying. They ask whether the structure under your money is sound — the way you’d ask about a building going up. Almost nobody has ever been shown the list, which is why almost every family fails several of them.
Why it goes wrong
Nothing fails. It just quietly never got done.
There is no moment at which a family decides to leave a fifth of its net worth without a named beneficiary. It happens because an account was opened in a hurry in 2014, the nomination field was optional, and nobody has looked at that screen since.
The same is true of every item below. They are not mistakes of judgement. They are the absence of anything that checks.
So Lineage checks — not once at onboarding, but every time a document arrives or a holding changes.
Of US adults have never made a will — and 56% of UK adults. The structural gaps below sit underneath that, unnoticed.
Pew Research ↗Americans have unclaimed property held by a state treasurer. Every country that publishes the figure tells the same story.
NAUPA ↗People lose track of a workplace retirement account every year in the US alone — not through carelessness, but because nothing checks.
Capitalize ↗The checklist
What runs, and what it tells you.
Is there a named beneficiary on every account holding real value?
We show the share of net worth that has one, and name the specific holdings that don’t — ordered by how much sits in each.
Does the name on the holding match your identity documents?
An initial, a maiden name, a spelling from 2011. The single most common reason a routine handover becomes a two-year process.
Do beneficiary designations match what you’ve written down?
Designation forms and written instructions drift apart over decades, and almost nowhere shows you both at once. Called a nomination in India. Why a nominee is not an heir.
Is one person holding every relationship?
If you alone know the fund manager, the banker and the accountant, that is a single point of failure — and it is you.
Could someone find all of this without you?
We score discoverability across the household and name exactly what is missing: which holdings, which documents, which credentials.
Who still has access they shouldn’t?
Old advisors, lapsed permissions, a login shared once years ago. Every grant is listed, dated, and switched off in a click.
How much of the family sits in one employer, one sector, one building?
Concentration is invisible while the pieces are in different apps. Vested equity plus unvested grants plus the ESPP is one exposure, not three.
Is there cover where the family would actually need it?
Sum assured against liabilities outstanding, not against a rule of thumb. A loan without matching cover is a structural gap, not a preference.
Where are the documents that prove ownership?
A holding nobody can evidence is a holding somebody will have to litigate. Missing title, missing policy, missing grant letter — each is listed.
Do joint holdings do what you assume they do?
Joint ownership, survivorship and nomination behave differently from one another. Families routinely assume all three mean the same thing.
Is anything dormant enough to be at risk of being swept away?
Accounts, folios and dividends go unclaimed on a timetable. We watch the clock on holdings that have gone quiet.
Are your parents’ affairs anywhere in this picture?
The generation above is where the least is written down and the most is assumed. A household can hold their positions without merging their money.
Governance sounds like something you do after you’ve arrived.
It’s what
gets you there intact.
What you get back
A short list, in the order that matters.
A readiness score on its own is a vanity metric. What is useful is a ranked list of named, specific, closeable gaps — each one attached to the holding it concerns and the document that would fix it.
Nothing here asks you to make a decision about death. It asks you to fill in a field, correct a spelling, or revoke an access you forgot about.
Readiness score, with its arithmetic shown
One figure for the household, broken into the components that produced it. You can see exactly which gap is costing which points, so the score is a to-do list rather than a grade.
The gap list, ranked by value at risk
Not alphabetical, not by category — by how much of your family’s net worth is exposed by each gap. The missing beneficiary on the largest holding sits at the top, where it belongs.
What to actually do about each one
The form to file, the registrar to write to, the document to produce, the person to tell. Where a verified professional is needed, you can grant one scoped access instead of starting a new relationship from scratch.
A record that the gap was closed
Fixes are dated and evidenced, so next year’s check starts from what is true rather than asking the same question again. The picture accumulates instead of resetting.
Sources
- 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.
- 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.
Find out which ones you’re failing.
The checks run on whatever you’ve brought in so far. A half-built picture already answers most of them.