Financial institutions have long focused their technological investments on the front-end experience of wealth accumulation, providing customers with sophisticated tools to grow and track their assets. However, a critical gap remains in the banking lifecycle: the transition of those assets after a customer passes away. Prismm, a fintech startup founded in 2020, has emerged to address this "infrastructure problem" by integrating beneficiary and estate planning directly into bank accounts from their inception. By digitizing the transfer of assets to heirs, Prismm seeks to eliminate the manual, friction-heavy processes that currently dominate the estate settlement industry.

The company is presenting its vision this week on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco. Prismm’s platform is designed to help banks retain deposits that are frequently lost to "estate attrition"—a phenomenon where heirs move inherited funds to other institutions because the original bank lacks a seamless system for account transition. Through its suite of products, Prismm allows account holders to designate beneficiaries, share critical documents, and ensure that the next generation remains within the bank’s ecosystem.

The Genesis of Prismm: From Personal Crisis to Professional Innovation

The motivation behind Prismm is rooted in the personal experiences of its founders, sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla. Both women possess extensive backgrounds in the financial sector, with decades of combined experience in banking operations and finance. The impetus for the company occurred in 2017, following Hurricane Irma in Miami. Their father was hospitalized after a fall while assisting a neighbor with storm recovery. During the crisis, the family realized that their mother, who had traditionally relied on her husband to manage the household’s finances and legal paperwork, was unable to locate essential documents or access critical accounts.

While their father eventually recovered, the incident exposed a systemic vulnerability in how families manage financial information during emergencies. The concept for Prismm solidified three years later, in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, Underwood was working within a bank and witnessed a surge of grieving families struggling to navigate the complexities of estate settlement. Heirs were often unable to locate accounts, understand outstanding bills, or find the necessary documentation to support surviving spouses.

Underwood noted that while the industry had perfected platforms for wealth growth, it had largely ignored the transition phase. This realization led to the conclusion that estate settlement was not merely a consumer convenience issue but a fundamental infrastructure failure within the banking system. By digitizing the process and integrating it into the core operations of financial institutions, Prismm aims to provide a proactive solution that begins long before a death occurs.

Addressing the Economic Impact of Estate Attrition

For financial institutions, the stakes of estate management are exceptionally high. Every year, banks lose billions of dollars in deposits due to estate attrition. When a primary account holder dies, the lack of a clear, digital path for inheritance often leads heirs to withdraw the funds and move them to their own primary banks. Industry data suggests that a significant percentage of heirs—up to 90% in some sectors of wealth management—sever ties with their parents’ financial institutions shortly after inheriting assets.

Prismm’s model addresses this by building relationships with the next generation of consumers before the wealth transfer takes place. By allowing account holders to grant designated family members access to accounts and documents ahead of time, the bank establishes a point of contact with the beneficiary. When the transition eventually occurs, the beneficiary is already familiar with the institution’s platform, and the identity, consent, and supporting documents are already on file. This allows for a remote, digital completion of the transfer, regardless of where the family members are located.

The Prismm Product Ecosystem: Designate, Anchor, and Continuity

Prismm has developed a tiered approach to solving the estate transition problem through three primary products, each targeting a specific stage of the account lifecycle.

Prismm Designate

The first product, Prismm Designate, provides banks with a digital interface for customers to update their beneficiaries. Traditionally, updating a beneficiary involves physical forms, notarization, or manual data entry by bank staff. Designate streamlines this process, ensuring that beneficiary information is current and easily accessible to the bank’s core system. This reduces the administrative burden on the bank and ensures that the legal groundwork for asset transfer is always in place.

Prismm Anchor

Prismm Anchor serves as a secure digital vault where account holders can consolidate information regarding their accounts, property, and other assets across multiple institutions. Unlike consumer-grade "digital legacy" apps, Anchor is offered directly through the financial institution. This integration ensures a higher level of security and allows users to manage their entire estate within their existing banking environment. Account holders can grant controlled access to designated individuals, ensuring that when an emergency occurs, the necessary information is immediately available to the right people.

Prismm Continuity

The third and most recent addition to the suite is Prismm Continuity. Currently in the final stages of development, Continuity is designed to guide both bank staff and grieving families through the actual step-by-step transfer of assets. By automating the workflows associated with inheritance—such as verifying death certificates and executing beneficiary payouts—Continuity keeps the most difficult part of the process within the institution. This minimizes the emotional and administrative burden on the family while ensuring the bank maintains control over the asset transition.

Solving the Gendered Burden of Estate Management

A key component of Prismm’s value proposition is its focus on reducing the burden on caregivers, who are disproportionately women. Research into estate settlement trends indicates that women are most often the primary executors of family affairs following a death. These individuals are frequently part of the "sandwich generation," simultaneously caring for children and aging parents.

Underwood emphasizes that for these caregivers, managing a mountain of manual paperwork during a time of grief is often overwhelming. By integrating estate planning into the "bank core"—the back-end systems that process transactions and update accounts—Prismm removes the friction from the process. This "infrastructure-first" approach ensures that the information needed to execute financial decisions is available at the click of a button, rather than buried in a physical filing cabinet or a disparate consumer app.

The Macro Context: The Great Wealth Transfer

Prismm’s entry into the market comes at a pivotal moment for the global economy, often referred to by economists as "The Great Wealth Transfer." Over the next two decades, an estimated $68 trillion to $84 trillion is expected to pass from the Baby Boomer generation to their heirs. For financial institutions, the ability to retain even a fraction of these assets is a matter of long-term survival.

Market analysis indicates that the average time to settle an estate in the United States currently ranges from 16 to 18 months, involving dozens of hours of manual labor and significant legal fees. By reducing this timeline through automation, Prismm provides a competitive advantage to banks. Institutions that can offer a "one-click" inheritance experience are far more likely to retain the loyalty of millennial and Gen Z heirs, who have grown accustomed to digital-first financial services.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and the Path Forward

The presentation of Prismm at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 highlights the growing intersection of fintech and "death tech"—a sector focused on digitizing the end-of-life industry. The Startup Battlefield competition, known for launching companies like Dropbox and Mint, provides a high-profile platform for Prismm to demonstrate its utility to investors and potential banking partners.

As the competition progresses in San Francisco, the focus remains on how Prismm will scale its integrations with major banking cores. The technical challenge of integrating with legacy banking systems is significant, but it is also what provides Prismm with a substantial moat against competitors. By operating as a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) platform, Prismm leverages the existing trust between a bank and its customers, rather than trying to build a new consumer brand from scratch.

The winner of the Startup Battlefield will be announced on Thursday, October 15. Regardless of the outcome, Prismm’s presence at the event signals a shift in the banking industry’s priorities. As the demographic landscape changes and the Great Wealth Transfer accelerates, the ability to manage the transition of wealth will become just as important as the ability to grow it. Prismm’s founders believe that by solving this infrastructure problem today, they are securing the financial stability of families and institutions for generations to come.