Prismm builds beneficiary and estate planning into bank accounts at the start, making it easier to transfer assets to heirs while helping banks keep a family’s money after an account holder’s death. The startup is presenting that mission today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on the Startup Battlefield stage.
Before a transfer is needed, account holders can authorize specific family members to access accounts and documents. After the account holder dies, that person can log in to view the assets and paperwork together and initiate eligible beneficiary transfers online. Identity, consent, and supporting documents are already recorded, allowing families to handle the process remotely even if they’re spread across different states.
Sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla founded Prismm in 2020, drawing on decades of banking and finance experience apiece. An emergency involving their own family had shown them the problem they wanted to address.
In 2017, their father fell while helping remove a tree from a neighbor’s roof in Miami after Hurricane Irma and was hospitalized. He’d always managed the family’s money and paperwork, leaving their mother and both sisters unsure where to find important documents and financial information. Although he recovered, the difficulty of accessing those details stayed with them.
Three years later, that early idea began to take shape. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Underwood was employed at a bank, where she saw bereaved families trying to locate accounts, make sense of bills, and work out how to support a surviving spouse.
Image Credits: Prismm
“That’s when it hit us that this is an infrastructure problem, and as I started to dig deeper, we’ve created all of these platforms for wealth growth and tracking, but almost nothing for transition,” Underwood said in an interview with TechCrunch. “It’s still very much all manual. And that’s when we said, ‘We can digitize this process.’ We were like, ‘We can solve it because we see that there’s other families that are going to have this issue,’ and that’s when we really doubled down.”
Underwood sees a separate consumer service as another responsibility for families at a time when they’re already under pressure. That’s why Prismm integrates with bank cores directly.
“What’s on the market is consumer-based,” Underwood said. “What we found is when you’re asking the consumer to do something with everything else on their list, that’s going to be the last thing they do, especially women. Women are the ones that are typically going to be handling these issues when there’s a death. We’re typically the caregivers, and so asking me to manage the documents for my mom and dad while I take care of my kids, my husband, everyone else, it just becomes too much. And so, this needs to be built as infrastructure, and there needs to be as little friction as possible to allow people to get to the information that they need to execute on a decision, and so that’s why we integrate directly into bank cores.”
Image Credits: Prismm
Two core products are available, with another under development. The first, Prismm Designate, allows customers to update their beneficiaries digitally through their bank. The company describes it as a simple tool meant to speed up those updates and reduce the effort required from customers and banks alike.
Prismm Anchor brings together information on an account holder’s accounts, documents, property, and other assets across multiple institutions. The company says this information is kept securely, and account holders decide what access designated people receive. Financial institutions provide Anchor, so customers don’t need a separate consumer app to manage these details.
A forthcoming product, Prismm Continuity, will walk staff and families through each stage of a transfer. Prismm says the institution will therefore retain responsibility for the hardest part of the process instead of passing that work to families.
Underwood and Sylla describe these tools as infrastructure for banks managing the aftermath of a customer’s death. In their account, financial institutions lose billions in deposits annually through “estate attrition,” when heirs move inherited funds elsewhere. The founders attribute those losses to banks having no system to manage account transitions after someone dies.
By using beneficiary information and making inheritance less complicated, banks could retain those assets and potentially gain the next generation as customers. The founders’ approach also calls for establishing relationships with heirs beforehand, rather than dealing only with transfers once a death has occurred.
“We will be the infrastructure that financial institutions use to move money to the next generation, because we don’t only understand that you execute on the back end,” Underwood said. “We understand that you need to be proactive and build relationships with the next generation of consumers on the front end.”
Prismm joins dozens of other startups and investors in San Francisco this week for TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition. The winner is due to be announced on Thursday, October 15.
