India is quietly sitting on a financial paradox. Families work hard to build savings across decades—bank deposits, insurance policies, investments, property records—yet when the time comes to transfer this wealth, much of it vanishes into obscurity. Not because it was misused, but because it was never documented, communicated, or structured.
The result is staggering. Unclaimed financial assets in India run into lakhs of crores, scattered across dormant accounts, forgotten policies, untracked investments, and missing documentation. Behind every such figure lies a family struggling not just with loss, but with uncertainty.
At the intersection of this problem sits an emerging discipline that blends tax compliance, legal foresight, and technology-driven automation—a space increasingly shaped by professionals who understand both regulation and real life.
One such professional is CA Vinod Rawal.
A Career Built on Compliance, Now Addressing Continuity
With over 37 years of professional experience, CA Vinod Rawal brings together a rare combination of expertise. He is a Chartered Accountant, a Law Graduate, and an Enrolled Agent (U.S. Tax), with deep involvement in domestic and international taxation, particularly in anti–money-laundering (AML) tax laws, regulatory reporting, and cross-border compliance.
For decades, his work has focused on ensuring that businesses and individuals remain compliant in increasingly complex regulatory environments—where a missed disclosure or undocumented asset can have legal, tax, or reputational consequences.
In recent years, Rawal has extended this work into the fintech domain, developing automation tools and MIS dashboards designed to simplify compliance workflows for tax and accounting professionals. These systems reduce human error, enhance transparency, and help practitioners move from reactive compliance to proactive governance.
It is this same compliance-first thinking that has now found expression in a larger societal concern: what happens to financial information when the person who holds it is no longer able to explain it?
India’s Silent Financial Crisis
In October 2025, the Supreme Court of India publicly highlighted the scale of unclaimed financial assets—estimated at over ₹3.5 lakh crore—bringing national attention to an issue long known to tax professionals but rarely discussed in public discourse.
The reasons are structural, not malicious. Indian families often rely on physical paperwork, informal records, or memory-based asset tracking. Financial conversations across generations are avoided out of discomfort or fear of appearing dependent. In NRI families, geographical distance further widens the information gap.
When illness, cognitive decline, or sudden death intervenes, families are left navigating banks, insurers, registrars, and courts with incomplete information. The legal system assumes documentation exists; families discover it does not.
From Tax Efficiency to Legacy Continuity
CA Rawal’s long exposure to regulatory reporting and AML frameworks revealed a fundamental insight:
Money that is undocumented is functionally invisible—both to regulators and to families.
This understanding led to the conceptualisation of SecuredVault, a cloud-based inheritance and asset-documentation platform designed not as a fintech product, but as a compliance-aligned continuity system.
Unlike conventional digital lockers, the platform is structured around indexed asset mapping, nomination tracking, process roadmaps, credential vaulting, audit logs, and event-based access controls. Its architecture reflects the same principles that govern financial compliance—traceability, controlled access, accountability, and consent.
Importantly, the system is designed so that no administrator can view user data, aligning with both data-protection norms and ethical governance standards.
Where Technology Meets Legal Reality
What distinguishes this approach is not the use of cloud technology alone, but the way it mirrors regulatory thinking. Just as tax authorities demand clarity of ownership, trail of transactions, and accountability, families too require a clear map of assets, responsibilities, and access rights.
For professionals—chartered accountants, estate planners, wealth managers—this represents a shift from transactional advisory to lifecycle governance. Structured asset documentation reduces disputes, accelerates claim processes, and ensures compliance even in the absence of the asset owner.
From a broader lens, such platforms signal a new category of compliance-driven fintech, where automation is not about speed alone, but about preserving intent across time.
CA Vinod Rawal Defines The Concept In His Words
The real transformation lies not in preparing for loss—but in enabling living collaboration. When families document and share financial information systematically, they create shared financial literacy across generations. Parents can guide children through investment decisions with full context. NRI families can coordinate cross-border planning with clarity. What begins as inheritance planning becomes continuous family financial governance—where knowledge flows naturally, decisions are made collectively, and wealth management is no longer a solo burden. This is not death management. This is life management with foresight.
A Broader Message for India’s Digital Future
As India accelerates toward digitisation—across banking, taxation, identity, and governance—the weakest link remains unstructured personal data. Financial inclusion cannot stop at account opening; it must extend to financial continuity.
The work emerging from professionals like CA Vinod Rawal highlights a simple but powerful truth:
legacy planning is not an emotional luxury—it is a compliance necessity.
When documentation is clear, families are protected. When access is controlled, privacy is preserved. And when systems are designed with both law and empathy in mind, technology becomes not just efficient—but humane.
In an age of automation, perhaps the most meaningful innovation is one that ensures clarity outlives the individual.
The above information does not belong to Outlook India and is not involved in the creation of this article.
