Digital Legacy in Switzerland: Accounts, Crypto & Passwords

A bike accident on your commute, a heart attack at 45, a fall on a ski slope: whatever it is, one moment you're here and the next you're gone. Your family grieves, and at the same time runs into a problem almost nobody thinks about: your digital life. The email account that holds your health insurance cancellation. The Instagram profile with ten years of photos. Maybe even a Bitcoin wallet whose password nobody but you ever knew.

A will and an advance care directive handle your money, your property and your medical care well in an emergency. Your digital legacy, most of the time, they don't, unless you actively think about it. We'll show you what happens legally to your online accounts, where cryptocurrency turns into a real risk, and how you can prepare in about an hour so your family isn't left standing in front of locked digital doors.

What Counts as Your Digital Legacy

Digital legacy sounds abstract, but in everyday life it's fairly concrete. It covers everything you need a login for, or that only exists online.

Email comes first, because almost every other service runs through it: whoever has access to your inbox can reset passwords and cancel subscriptions. Then there's social media profiles like Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn, cloud storage full of photos and documents, online banking and payment services like PayPal, Revolut or Yuh, cryptocurrency you hold yourself, ongoing subscriptions from streaming to your gym app, and finally your own domains or websites, if you run one.

Often forgotten: the phone or laptop itself. If it only unlocks with a fingerprint or face scan, even close family can't get in without the passcode, even though the device legally already belongs to them. Write the device passcode down together with your other access details, not out in the open, but in the same secure place as everything else.

Also worth taking seriously: purely personal, non-monetary value. Years of family photos in the cloud, private messages, a digital journal. Legally these barely count, emotionally they often matter most, especially now that fewer families keep printed photo albums at all.

Legally, there are two separate layers that often get mixed up: ownership of the asset, and access to it. The balance in your bank account undisputedly belongs to your heirs. Whether they can actually get into your e-banking is a different question entirely, more on that shortly.

What Swiss Inheritance Law Actually Says

Search for a law that specifically covers digital estates and in Switzerland you'll come up empty. Neither the Civil Code (ZGB) nor the Code of Obligations has specific rules for email accounts or crypto wallets. Ordinary inheritance law applies, full stop.

The key provision is Art. 560 of the Civil Code: your heirs automatically step into your entire legal position as a whole the moment you die, so-called universal succession. That applies to assets exactly as it does to debts, and it explicitly includes digital assets. Balances held with PayPal or Revolut, cryptocurrency, and even your own copyrighted work like photos or a blog, all become part of your estate automatically, with no separate will required.

The problem isn't the law, it's the practice. Your heirs have a clear legal claim to your assets, but not automatic access credentials. A provider based abroad often doesn't know Swiss inheritance law, or demands its own, sometimes lengthy proof. That gap between legal entitlement and practical access is exactly what a bit of preparation can close.

One detail worth knowing: Switzerland's Data Protection Act (DSG) only protects living people. Once you die, that protection ends and your digital data falls entirely under inheritance law instead of data protection law. That's another reason planning through a will and an advance care directive achieves so much here: there's no overriding data-protection hurdle standing in your heirs' way afterward.

Social Media, Email & Cloud: What Providers Actually Allow

Social media accounts are legally inheritable too, since they're ordinary contractual relationships that pass to your heirs along with everything else. The big platforms have responded to this by now, just with varying degrees of generosity.

Without setting this up in advance, your family is often left with the slow route through customer support, death certificate and proof of inheritance included. That can take weeks and doesn't work reliably with every provider. Five minutes per account today saves your heirs a lot of frustration later: activate Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Legacy Contact right after reading this.

Your email account deserves extra patience. Almost every other service uses that same address for password resets. Shut it down or delete it too early, and you suddenly lock accounts your heirs still need, just to wind everything else down properly.

Cryptocurrency: The Biggest Risk in Your Digital Legacy

With ordinary assets, the bank or customer support can usually help if something's unclear. With self-custody cryptocurrency, that contact simply doesn't exist. The private key or seed phrase is the only way in. If nobody but you knows it, the coins aren't just hard to transfer after you die, they're gone permanently. No account number, no support line, no recovery.

It looks different if you don't hold your crypto yourself but keep it on a regulated Swiss platform, a bank or a FINMA-supervised provider, for instance. There, access after death works much like an ordinary bank account: your heirs identify themselves with a death certificate and certificate of inheritance, and the platform releases the assets. The real risk sits specifically with genuine self-custody wallets, where nobody but you knows the key.

Tax-wise, nothing changes: cryptocurrency enters your estate at fair market value on the day you die and is subject to cantonal inheritance tax just like any other asset, more on that in our guide to Swiss inheritance tax. The problem is purely practical: your heirs first need to even know the value exists, then get to it.

Two things genuinely help. First: decide in your will who's technically capable enough to act as executor and identify and transfer crypto holdings, or who can bring in a specialist for that job. Second: document where your holdings are and roughly how to access them, but never write the seed phrase itself directly into the will. A will gets officially opened after you die and becomes readable by several people, a genuinely bad place for something this sensitive. The reference belongs in the will; the actual key belongs in a separate, secure place, a password manager or a bank safe deposit box, for example.

Your Digital Legacy Checklist: Three Steps to Prepare

The good news: the steps that matter most cost you nothing and fit into one relaxed hour on a Sunday evening.

Step 1: Build an inventory. List every account relevant to your heirs: email, online banking, payment services, social media, cloud storage, crypto wallets, ongoing subscriptions and any domains you own. The easiest way to do this systematically: search your email inbox for subject lines like "Welcome to" or "Confirm your account", which surfaces a surprising number of logins you'd otherwise forget. A simple table is enough, as long as it's complete.

Step 2: Centralize access. A password manager like Bitwarden or Proton Pass keeps every login in one place, protected by a single master password. That's more convenient for you day to day, and the fastest solution for your heirs in an emergency, provided someone can get to the master password.

Step 3: Secure access legally. This is where the advance care directive comes in, which we cover in detail in Advance Care Directive & Living Will in Switzerland. Add a clear instruction on who should get access to your password manager in an emergency, and store the master password itself separately, with a notary or someone you trust, for instance. If you're not married, this step matters even more: without a will or an advance care directive, your unmarried partner has no automatic legal access at all, as we explain in protecting unmarried couples. And because a will gets opened officially, the master password itself never belongs inside it, only a note of where to find it.

Practical Tip: The 20-Minute Check Tonight

Set aside 20 minutes this evening. Activate Google's Inactive Account Manager at myaccount.google.com/inactive and Apple's Legacy Contact under your name in iOS settings. Both are free and take just a few taps. Then write a rough list of your most important accounts in your notes app and save it in your password manager. That's not a complete digital legacy plan yet, but it closes the biggest gaps today, before you tackle the rest.

Conclusion: Access Matters as Much as Ownership

Your digital life doesn't disappear with you, it just sits there, locked, often completely out of reach for your family. Swiss inheritance law clearly settles who your digital assets belong to. It says nothing about how your heirs actually get to them.

The fix isn't an expensive trip to a law firm, it's one evening with a password manager, two activated legacy-contact features and an addition to your advance care directive. The one thing that least belongs in your will: sensitive access credentials. A note of where to find them is enough.

Put this off, and you're counting on someone, somehow, finding a way in later. With an ordinary bank account, that's usually true. With a Bitcoin wallet and no seed phrase, it never is.