Prismm Helps Banks Keep Inherited Money in the Family
With Prismm, account holders can give designated family members earlier access to their accounts and documents.
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Meet Prismm, a startup that helps banks keep families' money at home after the account owner dies. It does this by building beneficiary and estate planning into accounts from day one, which makes transferring assets to heirs less complicated. Prismm is presenting its mission today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
Prismm was founded in 2020 by sisters Martha Underwood and Sheila Silla, who each have decades of experience in banking and finance. The couple came up with the idea of Prismm based on their own experience of how difficult it is to manage a family's affairs in an emergency.
Their father was hospitalized in Miami in 2017 after a tree fell from a neighbor's roof following Hurricane Irma. Their mother, who always relied on him to handle the family's financial and administrative affairs, did not know where all the important documents and financial information were, and neither did they. Their father recovered, but the experience of not knowing how to access vital information took a toll.
That was the starting point for Prismm, but the idea really took shape three years later, when Underwood was working at a bank during the COVID-19 pandemic. He saw families arriving after a loved one had died and struggled to find accounts, understand bills and how to support the surviving spouse.
"That's when we realized it was an infrastructure problem, and as I started to dig deeper, we had built all these platforms for wealth growth and tracking, but almost nothing for transfers," Underwood said in an interview with TechCrunch. "It's still very, very manual. And that's when we said, 'We can digitize this process.'
With Prismm, account holders can give designated family members early access to their accounts and documents. When the account holder dies, the designated person can log in, view assets and documents in one place, and initiate the transfer to the eligible beneficiary digitally. Because identity, consent, and supporting documents are all already on file, the process can be completed remotely, even when family members live in different states.
"What's in the market is consumer driven," Underwood said. "What we've found is that when you ask the consumer to do something with everything else on their list, that's the last thing they do, especially women. Women are usually the ones who deal with these things when they die. We're usually the caregivers, and so they ask me to manage the paperwork for my mom and dad while I'm taking care of my husband. The rest, it just becomes too much. And so, it has to be built as infrastructure, and it has to be as frictionless as possible." "There's less to allow people to get to the information they need to make a decision, and that's why we're integrating directly into the banking core."
The company has two main products, the third one is under development. The first, Prismm Designate, allows banks to provide customers with a simple, digital way to update their beneficiaries. The goal is to make it faster and easier for both customers and banks to keep stakeholders updated.
The second, Prismm Anchor, gives account holders a secure place to keep track of their accounts, documents, property and other assets across multiple institutions, with controlled access for designated individuals. It's offered through financial institutions, so users can manage everything without needing a separate consumer app.
A third product, Prismm Continuity, is coming soon. It guides employees and families step by step through the transition process. The startup says this keeps the most difficult part of the process in-house, rather than putting the burden on families.
Underwood and Silla describe Prism as an infrastructure that helps banks deal with what happens when a customer dies. They say financial institutions lose billions in deposits each year to "asset collapse," which is when heirs transfer inherited money to other institutions because banks have no system in place to manage the transfer of accounts. After a death, instead of losing those accounts, banks can use beneficiary information and simpler inheritance processes to keep assets and potentially the next generation of customers at their institution.
"We're going to be the infrastructure that financial institutions use to move money to the next generation, because we just don't know what you're running on the back end," Underwood said. "We understand that you need to be proactive and engage with the next generation of consumers."
Check out Prismm and dozens of other startups and investors gathered in San Francisco this week for TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield competition. The lucky winner will be announced on Thursday, October 15th.
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Ayesha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining the publication in 2021, he was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Ayesha holds a Bachelor's degree with honors from the University of Toronto and a Master's degree in Journalism from Western University.
You can contact or confirm Aisha by sending an email to [email protected] or by sending an encrypted message to aisha_malik.01 on Signal.
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