Meet Prismm, a startup that helps banks keep families’ money in-house after an account holder dies. It does this by building beneficiary and estate planning into accounts from day one, which makes the transfer of 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 Shella Sylla, who each have decades of experience in banking and finance. The pair came up with the idea for Prismm based on their own experience of seeing firsthand how difficult it can be to manage a family’s affairs in an emergency. Their father was hospitalized in 2017 after he fell while helping clear a tree from a neighbor’s roof following Hurricane Irma in Miami.
Their mother, who had always relied on him to handle the family’s finances and paperwork, didn’t 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 critical information stuck with them. 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.
She saw families come in after a loved one had died, scrambling to find accounts, understand bills, and figure out how to support the surviving spouse. 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.” With Prismm, account holders can give designated family members access to their accounts and documents ahead of time. When the account holder dies, the designated person can log in, see the assets and documents in one place, and start eligible beneficiary transfers 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. 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.” The company has two central products, with a third in development. The first, Prismm Designate, lets banks offer customers a simple, digital way to update their own beneficiaries. The goal is to make keeping beneficiaries up to date faster and easier for both customers and banks.
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