Your firm’s balance sheet includes property, WIP and goodwill. Should it also contain the collection of wills your firm has drafted and stored over the years — your will bank?
The will bank has a value; there is a market on which they can be bought and sold. However, many managing partners have never considered including the will bank as an asset on the firm’s balance sheet.
We think that is an error.
Depreciating Asset Value
A will bank is more valuable if the information in it is accessible and current.
When a client’s will was drafted in, say, 2015, their circumstances were captured accurately at that point. But since then, they may have married or remarried. They may have had children or grandchildren. They may have sold a business, inherited property, divorced, or lost a beneficiary.
The document your firm holds may no longer reflect their intentions — or in some cases, it may be legally ineffective. The asset value can be greatly increased by verifying and enhancing the information it contains. Take a few minutes to use our estimating tool.
The Maintenance Problem
Depreciating asset value is easy to understand in the abstract. Having a means to do anything about it is the challenge.
Private client teams are generally reactive: the client comes back when they know they need to. The problem is that clients frequently do not know they need to. Research consistently shows that people dramatically underestimate how often a will should be reviewed, and the majority of those who have a will have never updated it.
The practical result is that your will bank — an asset that should be generating regular review appointments, referrals into LPAs, trust work, and estate planning conversations — sits quietly doing none of those things.
An up-to-date will bank is worth multiples more than its out-of-date counterpart. The question is whether your firm treats it accordingly.
The firms getting this right are those who have reframed their will bank not as a filing obligation, but as an opportunity to enhance client relationships and address the duty of care questions that require active will bank management. They distinguish between a paper-based register (high cost, low yield), a digital record (useful but still passive), and a genuinely managed client base where outreach is regular, relationships are warm, and the firm is the first call when something changes.
The Uncomfortable Question
So the question for any managing partner is this: how do you migrate from passive to proactive? The answers are usually uncomfortable.
Many firms lack the internal capacity and expertise needed to tackle the initiative. There are very few specialists able to assist. That is why PSOut has introduced Will Bank Transformation.
Increase Asset Value, Drive Fee Income
Transforming private client information into valuable and productive assets requires specialist skills and fit-for-purpose processes. We are able to work quickly to ensure that fee income supports compelling ROIs as well as helping to optimise the fee capacity of the private client teams.
We welcome enquiries from ambitious firms that manage established will banks and want to recognise that it is an asset with client service potential.