Clocr is a digital estate planning service that was born in the same way almost every service I have discovered in this space comes to be. When a founder has a personal experience with a loved one’s death that sheds light on the lack of tools and services to help manage their digital estate. In this case the idea came to its CEO and co-founder Apoorva Chintala shortly after the passing of her grandfather. After his death, she was thrust into the role of helping determine her grandfather’s wishes and how to disburse his assets. She did this along with her father Sree Chintala who is also the CTO / co-founder of the company. Together their goal was to use technology to help empower others to address the issues they faced during this process for an age old problem of helping a family with the loss of a loved one with a service that reduces the complications related to estate planning.
When creating my account the first notable difference from other services I have reviewed is that you are asked if the account is personal or business. That is because it can also be used as a service provided by companies for their clients. I’ll provide some more details around that aspect later.
Upon account creation you are guided through a survey that asks several questions around personal information to help with the initial configuration of your account. After completing that simple on-boarding you are presented with a dashboard to show each step and your progress completion percentage for each section for your account setup. If you first want to get oriented with the service there is a good tutorial that uses a fictitious account to guide you through the data that should be added for each step.
The dashboard contains several categories that you collect data for including personal where you add details about your devices such as phone and laptop. You can also upload identification documents such as you driver’s license and passport. The nominees area is where you add the people that can be designated to to gain access to all data, or only specific sections. An example is designating your spouse to all accounts in the financial area or granting another nominee access to only certain accounts within an area. The permissions are both flexible and granular giving you good control options for access. Now is probably a good time to mention that the service prides itself on a security model which goes beyond most other services utilizing IPFS along with other proprietary systems.
The next section is medical where you can store data related to your vitals, medications, allergies along with doctors details and the ability to upload medical documents. The financial area allows you to add all of your accounts, taxes and has its own section for adding crypto assets as well. An account wizard is provided to easily let you add many accounts in a batch process. The legal area is to store your will, trust and directives documents and you can also add your legal contacts and any related online accounts. The insurance area can store all of your contacts and policy documents along with details for any related online accounts. Lastly the online & social media section has a wizard to add all of your accounts such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can request to either transfer access to accounts or request they are closed, but note that each service may also have their own terms of service you will need to abide by.
Beyond the guided areas there is another section called Digital Estate where you can manage adding all account types for any area with the help of a wizard and can even import account data from Google Chrome if you have it stored there. If you are a nominee you can also log into your account and see all the accounts that are shared with you from this section as well.
The Digital Vault provides one place to access all the files you stored from the previous areas such as financial, medical and legal areas and you have the ability to create additional folders and files that you can add and organize here as well. The Time Capsule section lets you store private message that can later be shared with family and friends in a timeframe you designate. These can include both written message or video or audio files that you choose to upload. The ICE Vault is an “In Case of Emergency” area to provide immediate access for contacts that you can designate. Any information or files that are tagged with an “ICE” designation in other areas will be provided directly here for the contacts to access. You can turn this access on or off within the ICE section as necessary for limited periods of time as well.
I originally mentioned during account creation there is a choice for business account designation. The Advisor Access area is the section where you can grant a third party access to view specific data. This could include your attorney, financial planner or other professional roles. If you grant access you will see them listed here. Conversely a business can setup an account where they can provide Clocr as a white label service and from their dashboard manage all of their clients accounts.
Summary
Clocr provides an open and flexible way to manage and categorize all of your essential digital assets and related online account data. The service also provides some of the strongest security amongst services in this space. The ICE Vault is a unique feature that could prove to be very useful. Lastly, if you are a professional that provides estate planning for your clients, you can add this as a tool in your portfolio of services for your clients. Clocr offers a free 14 day trial and if you choose to subscribe it’s a $59.99 annual fee.
