Prismm Streamlines Estate Planning and Asset Transition to Help Banks Prevent Billions in Deposit Losses
The modern financial ecosystem is heavily optimized for wealth accumulation, digital tracking, and investment growth, yet it routinely falters during life’s most critical inflection points. When an account holder passes away, surviving family members are frequently thrust into a fragmented, highly manual bureaucratic maze. This transition gap not only places an intense emotional and administrative toll on grieving households, but it also costs traditional financial institutions billions of dollars annually in what the industry terms "estate attrition."
Entering this high-stakes arena is Prismm, an innovative fintech startup founded in 2020 by sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla. Designed to function as embedded banking infrastructure rather than a standalone consumer application, Prismm integrates beneficiary designation, document management, and estate transition tools directly into bank core systems. The company is showcasing its platform on the prestigious Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, drawing attention to a systemic flaw in how financial institutions handle generational wealth transfer.
The Personal Catalyst and Founding Story
The intellectual foundation of Prismm was years in the making, born from a combination of professional exposure and deeply personal family emergencies. In 2017, Underwood and Sylla’s father sustained severe injuries after falling while clearing a tree from a neighbor’s roof in Miami in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. Rushed to the hospital, he was incapacitated, leaving the family in sudden disarray. Their mother, who had traditionally relied entirely on her husband to manage household finances, bills, and critical paperwork, had no idea where important financial information was stored. The sisters were similarly in the dark.
Although their father ultimately recovered, the psychological imprint of that emergency remained. The true tipping point, however, occurred three years later during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While working inside a retail bank, Underwood witnessed a distressing pattern: grieving families arriving at branches day after day, scrambling blindly to locate hidden accounts, decipher complex bills, and secure financial stability for surviving spouses under immense duress.
Recognizing that existing wealth-management tools ignored the mechanics of asset transfer, Underwood and Sylla established Prismm in 2020. Drawing on their decades of combined experience in banking and finance, the co-founders identified that the root of the problem was structural. Rather than expecting overburdened consumers to adopt separate, third-party apps to manage end-of-life paperwork, Prismm sought to embed the solution directly into the financial institutions where the capital already lived.
Understanding the Product Suite: Designate, Anchor, and Continuity
Prismm operates on a B2B2C model, providing banks with a tiered suite of software products designed to modernize inheritance workflows from day one of account creation. The company’s architecture currently comprises two core offerings, with a third in advanced development.
Prismm Designate
The first product allows financial institutions to offer their customers an intuitive, fully digital interface to update and manage their beneficiaries. Historically, updating beneficiaries required cumbersome paper forms, notarization, or in-branch visits—frictions that often resulted in outdated records. Prismm Designate streamlines this process, enabling banks to maintain accurate, legally compliant beneficiary data continuously.
Prismm Anchor
The second product addresses the broader challenge of cross-institution asset and document consolidation. Prismm Anchor provides account holders with a secure repository to track accounts, physical property, legal documents, and other assets across multiple financial institutions. Crucially, the platform features controlled-access permissions, allowing account holders to grant trusted family members visibility into these critical assets ahead of time. Because the service is integrated directly through the user’s primary financial institution, it eliminates the need for consumers to juggle separate, unsecured personal finance applications.
Prismm Continuity
Currently in the pipeline for upcoming release, Prismm Continuity is designed to guide both bank personnel and designated heirs through the complex operational steps of asset transfer following a death. By standardizing and digitizing the back-end workflow, the startup aims to keep the most arduous aspects of estate execution housed securely within the financial institution, drastically reducing friction for surviving family members.
Addressing the Trillion-Dollar Generational Wealth Transfer
The timing of Prismm’s market entry coincides with the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in modern history. Over the next two decades, trillions of dollars in assets are projected to move from Baby Boomers to Gen X and Millennials. However, traditional retail banks face a severe vulnerability during this transition: estate attrition.
When an account holder dies without seamless digital infrastructure in place, surviving heirs frequently pull inherited funds out of the original financial institution and consolidate them with external wealth managers, brokerages, or competitor banks. Because banks historically lacked proactive mechanisms to engage the next generation of customers, this capital flight represented an inevitable cost of doing business.
Prismm addresses this challenge by reframing estate transition as a relationship-building opportunity rather than a purely administrative closure. By streamlining identity verification, consent tracking, and supporting document uploads, the platform allows beneficiaries to initiate eligible transfers remotely—even across different states—without stepping foot inside a physical bank branch.
Furthermore, Underwood points out a distinct sociological factor driving the need for automated infrastructure: the disproportionate burden placed on women during family emergencies. As primary caregivers, women frequently shoulder the emotional and administrative labor of managing a deceased relative’s estate while simultaneously balancing careers and family responsibilities. Asking consumers to voluntarily navigate complex, manual estate-planning checklists on top of these responsibilities routinely fails. By building Prismm directly into bank cores, the process requires minimal end-user friction, effectively shifting the heavy lifting from the grieving family to the financial institution.
Startup Battlefield and Industry Outlook
Prismm’s presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 places the startup in front of a global audience of venture capitalists, tech executives, and financial sector leaders. The annual Startup Battlefield competition in San Francisco is renowned for discovering early-stage disruptors that go on to redefine their respective industries, with the overall winner scheduled to be announced on Thursday, October 15.
As fintech innovation expands beyond traditional budgeting and trading apps into deeply operational banking infrastructure, companies like Prismm highlight a growing industry demand for enterprise-grade workflow automation. By solving a historically neglected operational bottleneck, Prismm is positioning itself as a vital bridge between financial institutions and the future custodians of generational wealth.
