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Episode 51 · Fintech · 52 min

The will before the assets

Yellow has pulled estate planning out of the HNI wealth office and re-priced it for mid-market India — a country where ₹1.5 lakh crore sits unclaimed because nobody named a nominee. The founders' case: a will is financial hygiene for a 25-year-old, not paperwork for the dying.

Savings & wealth Consumer India Regulation & policy

Niranjan and Nikhil

Co-founders, Yellow · with Vishal Krishna

51:39

Said in this episode

▶ 6:18

₹1–1.5L cr

Unclaimed financial assets in India

Roughly $20 billion stuck in insurance, PF and bank accounts because no nominee or will exists — and that excludes real estate.

▶ 7:10

90%+

Employees with no PF nomination

At one 20,000-person corporate Yellow is talking to, HR said more than ninety percent of staff had never filed a provident-fund nomination.

▶ 17:39

50% vs <10%

US vs India will penetration

Roughly half of US adults have created a will; Yellow's pre-launch research found single-digit penetration in India, rising to only 12–15% even in the 50–60 bracket.

▶ 12:27

95%

Indians who die without a will

Without a will, religion- and gender-specific personal laws — some written over a century ago — decide who inherits.

▶ 48:23

3 years

Typical asset-transfer timeline

Even financial assets can take three years to transfer without a will, versus three to six months with one; Yellow's stated goal is next-day transfer.

▶ 39:19

<5 min

Time to a first will on Yellow

Nikhil timed his own first will on the app at under five minutes, against an average of three months through the offline lawyer route.

The brief

The argument in sixty seconds

India is sitting on one to one-and-a-half lakh crore rupees — about twenty billion dollars — of unclaimed financial assets, and Yellow's co-founders argue the cause is behavioural, not technical. Half of American adults have a will; India is in single digits, and at one 20,000-person corporate, over ninety percent of employees had never filed a PF nomination. Nikhil spent fifteen years doing estate planning for HNI families; Niranjan came back from Stanford and the US bitten by entrepreneurship. Yellow distils that locked-up expertise into a guided app, re-pricing the will from lakhs to a few thousand rupees — though the IT Act 2000 still forces the final document onto paper with two witnesses. Along the way: Hindu intestacy's in-law asymmetry, a Punjab court case born of COVID, an HR-channel go-to-market that borrows employer trust, and the endgame — compressing India's three-year asset transfer to the day after demise is proven.

Worth your time if you are

Young professionals who haven't named a single nominee

Founders selling behaviour change, not features

B2B operators building HR-channel distribution

NRIs with assets and family split across countries

Episode map

Where the conversation travels

Every block is a chapter, coloured by what it's about. Click any of it to jump straight to that minute on YouTube.

Savings & wealthConsumer IndiaRegulation & policySales, GTM & growthProduct strategyFounder journey

01Cold open: wills, not the cigarette brand 0:00 Vishal opens with the pun and the premise — wills are for the young too — before the founders define Yellow as a digitally enabled estate-planning solution for mid-market India, a phrase most Indians confuse with real estate or lawn care. 02Superstition, procrastination, parents 3:30 Roughly half of US adults have a will while India shies away out of superstition and procrastination — and children can't raise the subject with their own parents without it sounding like a claim on the assets. 03₹1.5 lakh crore, unclaimed 6:18 ₹1–1.5 lakh crore lies unclaimed in Indian insurance, PF and bank accounts; at one 20,000-employee corporate over 90% had no PF nomination, and even the host admits he doesn't know his own UAN. 04Guardians, guitars and car collections 8:53 A will is the only legal way to name a guardian for minor children, and it can pass on guitars, shoe collections, copyrights and one client's cars — a single page signed before two witnesses is valid. 05Intestacy by religion; the IT Act carve-out 12:10 Die intestate — as 95% of Indians do — and century-old personal laws split assets by religion and gender, as in the Punjab case where a widow's ₹2.5 crore went to her mother-in-law; meanwhile the IT Act 2000 still keeps wills off digital signatures. 06Start at 23; the bank-locker paradox 16:48 Create your will with your first assets and champion the conversation at home, because a will stored in a bank locker proves heirship only to someone who can already open the locker — so segregate jewels by locker and name nominees for contents. 07Lakhs to thousands, via the HR channel 20:39 Estate-planning expertise sits inside HNI wealth firms at lakhs per will; Yellow distils it into an app priced in the thousands and distributes through corporate financial-wellness programmes, defending behaviour change against VC scepticism with the Flipkart analogy. 08Every beneficiary needs a backup 26:01 A will has a testator, assets, beneficiaries and an executor — and the cautionary tale of a couple who named only each other, died in quick succession, and left an heir a year of pulling documents out of drawers. 09Early traction in nuclear-family India 29:46 Two months in: a couple of thousand word-of-mouth downloads, four to five corporate sessions including 500 people at an IT major, NRI demand — set against nuclear families replacing the patriarch who once settled estates, and the term-insurance parallel. 10Angels, friction and the five-minute will 34:27 Angel investors backed the behaviour-change bet a year in: replace the three-month, high-cost lawyer round-trip with a first will in under five minutes, free updates, pay-only-on-generation pricing, and no legalese. 11Stanford meets the estate planner 41:02 After a quick exchange on privacy — Yellow cannot see what's inside your will — the founders trace how a Stanford-trained US returnee and a 15-year HNI estate planner met through a common friend in Bangalore and committed to the idea in late 2021. 12Digital assets and the next-day transfer 45:09 Crypto, social accounts and copyrights are the next frontier for bequests, the post-demise transfer ecosystem needs radical digitisation to cut three years to next-day, and the episode closes on Think School, podcasts and goodbyes.

Takeaways

Ideas to carry out of this hour

India's inheritance default is a 100-year-old law

Ninety-five percent of Indians die intestate, which hands distribution to personal laws written over a century ago that split by religion and gender. A Hindu male's estate goes equally to mother, spouse and children; a Hindu female's goes to her in-laws before her own parents if spouse and children are gone. The founders cite a live Punjab High Court case: a young couple died during COVID and the wife's ₹2.5 crore went by law to her mother-in-law, while her own mother — who actually needed the support — fights for a share. A will is the only instrument that overrides that default.

▶ 12:27 ▶ 13:18 ▶ 13:52

Unclaimed crores are a behaviour problem, not a product gap

Between ₹1 lakh and ₹1.5 lakh crore — roughly $20 billion — sits unclaimed in Indian insurance, PF and bank accounts, and that excludes real estate. At one 20,000-employee corporate Yellow spoke to, HR confirmed more than 90% of staff had never filed a PF nomination; even host Vishal admits he doesn't know his own UAN three years after leaving employment. The mechanism is brutal: if you can't recall your PF number, your family certainly can't claim it after you.

▶ 6:18 ▶ 7:10 ▶ 7:47

A will is a living document — review it like your taxes

Calling it the 'last will and testament' trained Indians to treat the document as a deathbed ritual — and a deathbed signature can be challenged as coercion anyway. The counter-frame: create it early, update it often, and review it annually at tax time or at life events like marriage and children. Even a single page signed before two witnesses is legally valid; Yellow layers best practices on top, like naming a guardian for minor children — the only legal route to do so — instead of leaving custody to a court.

▶ 8:03 ▶ 8:37 ▶ 8:53

Name a backup, or the will is as good as unwritten

A couple diligently wrote mutual wills leaving everything to each other — then died in quick succession, making the documents as good as no will at all. Their US-based heir spent close to a year in India pulling documents out of drawers to list the assets, and the transfer still isn't complete. Hence Yellow's structure: a primary beneficiary plus a backup, and an executor — the fourth, forgotten role — to give effect to the transfer.

▶ 27:45 ▶ 28:19 ▶ 28:37

The IT Act carve-out shapes the entire product

The IT Act 2000 digitised Indian commerce but specifically excluded wills and other testamentary documents, so 22 years later a will must still be printed and signed before two physical witnesses — though no notarisation or registration is required. Yellow digitises everything up to that signature and regenerates the document on each update, charging only at generation. The bank-locker paradox shows why paper-only storage fails: the banker demands proof of heirship, which is the will, which is inside the locker.

▶ 14:43 ▶ 15:17 ▶ 18:39

Borrow trust from HR instead of buying eyeballs

Yellow's go-to-market is B2B-first: corporate financial-wellness programmes, where HR acts as a trusted curator for employee bases averaging 25 to 27 years old. The first month produced four to five awareness sessions, including a 90-minute, 500-person session at a big IT major that overflowed with questions on legality, nominations and data privacy. VCs flinch at 'awareness' businesses, but the founders argue that taking a category from roughly 5% adoption toward 50% is behaviour change by definition — the same kind Flipkart had to engineer for Indian e-commerce.

▶ 23:41 ▶ 25:26 ▶ 30:03

The transfer, not the document, is the real product

Writing the will is the entry ticket; the hard part is post-demise transfer, where every institution has its own claim form, its own nomination format, even its own photo-size limits. With a will, financial assets move in three to six months; without one, succession certificates can stretch even financial transfers to three years. Yellow assists transfers even for families who never used the app, and its stated endgame is digitised rails that put assets in heirs' hands the day after demise is proven.

▶ 47:10 ▶ 48:40 ▶ 49:15

The numbers, drawn

What the episode measures

Every figure below was said on air — timestamps included, caveats kept.

Conversation share

portion of the hour spent on each theme

Savings & wealth38%

Consumer India14%

Regulation & policy13%

Sales, GTM & growth11%

Product strategy9%

Founder journey8%

Computed from the chapter map of this episode.

Who has actually written a will

% of adults

As stated in conversation: ~50% of US adults overall and 75–80% over 55 (lower bound shown); India's over-55 figure comes from Yellow's ~500-person study, and overall Indian penetration was described only as 'single digit'.▶ 33:00

How long an asset transfer takes

months

Timelines as stated in conversation: 3–6 months with a will (upper bound shown), up to three years without one even for financial assets; Yellow's stated aim of next-day transfer once demise is proven is plotted as ~0.03 months.▶ 48:40

Worth keeping

Lines that stay

It's called the 'last will and testament', which I think is the greatest disservice to the document — it makes people think you should do it only on your deathbed.

— Niranjan ▶ 8:03

We all have family doctors, but rarely family lawyers.

— Nikhil ▶ 36:09

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Put in the three to five assets all of us know off the top of our mind — bank account, insurance, PF — and get the protection in place for your family today.

— Niranjan ▶ 38:26

Our aim is that if the demise is proven, you should have the assets with you the next day.

— Nikhil ▶ 49:15

Clips that travel

Short on time? Start here

Young professionals who haven't named a single nominee

The ₹1.5 lakh crore nobody claims

The unclaimed-assets mountain, the 90% PF-nomination gap, and why the 'last will' framing kills adoption.

5:45 → 8:53 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Married couples with single-name bank accounts

Die without a will, and a 100-year-old law decides

Hindu intestacy's in-law asymmetry, a live Punjab HC case over ₹2.5 crore, and the 22-year-old digital carve-out for wills.

12:10 → 15:34 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

B2B founders selling behaviour change

Borrowing trust from HR

Yellow's HR-channel GTM — why employer trust beats ad spend when the product asks users to face mortality.

22:46 → 26:01 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Anyone whose will names only one beneficiary

The couple who left everything to each other

A real failure case: mutual wills with no backup beneficiary, and the year spent pulling documents out of drawers.

27:11 → 29:29 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

Fintech operators eyeing infrastructure gaps

From three years to the next day

The post-demise maze of mismatched claim forms, the three-year timeline, and the case for next-day digital transfer.

46:53 → 49:32 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Glossary

The jargon, unpacked

Estate planning

Putting tools in place to protect a person's assets and liabilities — the 'estate' — for the family's benefit if something happens to them; in India routinely confused with real estate or lawn care.

Intestate

Dying without a valid will. Religion- and gender-specific personal laws, some over a century old, then decide who inherits — the fate of roughly 95% of Indians.

Nominee

The person named on a bank, insurance or PF account to receive the balance on death — a custodian, not automatically the legal heir.

UAN / PF nomination

The Universal Account Number identifying an Employees' Provident Fund corpus, and the form naming who can claim it; unfiled nominations feed India's unclaimed-assets pile.

Succession certificate

The court document establishing legal heirship when there is no will — the slow step that can stretch even financial-asset transfers to three years.

Executor

The fourth role in a will alongside testator, assets and beneficiaries: the person who gives effect to the transfer of assets after demise.

Connections

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EP 18 · Fintech

Full transcript

The whole conversation, searchable

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