About STEP

STEP is a global professional body, comprising lawyers, accountants, trustees and other practitioners that help families plan for their futures.

Our mission is to inspire confidence in families planning their assets across generations by setting and upholding high professional standards, informing public policy, promoting education, and connecting practitioners globally to share knowledge and best practice.

Full STEP members, known as TEPs, are internationally recognised as experts in their field.

You can search for a STEP member on our Directory

Why is STEP interested in digital assets?

As specialists in inheritance and succession planning, STEP members draft wills and trusts, administer estates, act as trustees and advise families on how best to structure their finances to ensure compliance and preserve their assets for future generations.

As more and more of our lives now takes place online, planning for what happens to our digital assets is becoming just as important as what happens to our physical assets. But lots of people just haven’t thought about it.

In their professional practice, STEP members often help people at difficult or emotional times, such as after the death of a close family member. Increasingly our members are seeing families struggle to gain access to digital assets that in some case have a great deal of sentimental and/or financial value. This adds huge strain and distress at what is already an incredibly difficult time for families.

We want to do something about this. So we are working to build awareness of some of the actions you can take now to plan for what will happen to your digital assets when you are no longer here. And we are also working to highlight some of the difficulties with service providers and with governments to try to encourage them to do more to address the issues families face in this area.

You can find out more about STEP at www.step.org