Prabowo Widodo
The financial services industry has long excelled at acquiring customers and growing wealth, but it has historically neglected one of the most inevitable and critical phases of the financial lifecycle: asset transition. Every year, commercial banks and financial institutions lose billions of dollars in deposits to what the industry defines as estate attrition. When an account holder passes away, surviving family members frequently struggle with archaic, fragmented, and manual processes to claim inheritance. Frustrated by the friction, heirs often withdraw the funds and move them to competing institutions, resulting in a massive outflow of generational wealth.
Enter Prismm, a financial technology startup founded in 2020 by sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla. Prismm is designed to solve this infrastructure failure by embedding beneficiary designation and estate planning directly into bank accounts from day one. By streamlining the inheritance process, the startup helps financial institutions retain multi-generational wealth in-house. On the heels of its rapid development, Prismm is presenting its mission on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, introducing its B2B SaaS solutions to a global audience of investors, tech leaders, and industry executives.
The Genesis of Prismm: Personal Trauma Inspires Fintech Innovation
The inspiration for Prismm was born out of personal necessity and the founders’ firsthand experience with the chaotic realities of estate management during an emergency. In 2017, Underwood and Sylla’s father suffered a severe fall while helping clear a storm-damaged tree from a neighbor’s roof in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Miami, Florida. Rushed to the hospital, he required extensive medical care and hospitalization.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident, the family faced a secondary crisis. Their mother, who had traditionally relied entirely on her husband to manage the household’s finances, paperwork, and banking relationships, had no idea where critical documents or account details were located. Neither did Underwood nor Sylla. Fortunately, their father eventually made a full recovery, but the terrifying realization of how difficult it is to access crucial financial information during a crisis left an indelible mark on the sisters.
Three years later, the idea crystallized into a business concept. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Underwood was working inside a traditional commercial bank. Day after day, she witnessed grieving families walking into bank branches, completely overwhelmed as they scrambled to locate accounts, decipher utility bills, and figure out how to financially support surviving spouses. The manual, paper-heavy systems utilized by banks were wholly inadequate for modern families navigating sudden loss. Recognizing that this was a systemic industry problem rather than an isolated family grievance, Underwood and Sylla leveraged their decades of combined experience in banking and finance to officially establish Prismm.
Bridging the Gap: How Prismm Works
Prismm operates on a B2B2C model, integrating directly into bank core systems to function as seamless financial infrastructure rather than just another standalone consumer application. The platform approaches estate transition through three core pillars: proactive front-end data management and back-end execution efficiency.
Account holders use Prismm to grant designated family members secure, pre-authorized access to their accounts, physical property records, legal documents, and asset inventories across multiple financial institutions. When an account holder passes away, the designated heir can securely log into the bank’s existing portal, view all consolidated assets in one centralized dashboard, and initiate eligible beneficiary transfers digitally. Because identity verification, legal consent, and supporting documentation are already authenticated and stored on file with the bank, the entire transfer process can be executed remotely. This eliminates the need for grieving relatives to make multiple in-person branch visits or mail physical death certificates, a particularly vital feature for families dispersed across different states.
Prismm’s Product Suite
To address the multifaceted challenges of estate attrition, Prismm has developed a robust suite of software products tailored for financial institutions:
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Prismm Designate: This front-end tool allows banks to offer their retail customers an intuitive, digital interface to update and manage their beneficiaries quickly. By making the updating process frictionless, banks can maintain accurate, up-to-date records proactively.
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Prismm Anchor: Serving as a secure asset repository, Anchor enables account holders to monitor accounts, physical property, and documents spanning multiple financial institutions. Because it is white-labeled and offered directly through the user’s primary financial institution, consumers do not need to download or trust a third-party consumer app with their sensitive financial data.
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Prismm Continuity (Coming Soon): Currently in active development, Continuity is a back-end workflow engine designed to guide bank personnel and families through the complex asset transfer process step by step. The product shifts the operational burden away from grieving families and places it securely within the financial institution’s trained staff.
The Gender Demographic and the Caregiver Burden
In developing the platform, the founders placed heavy emphasis on the human element of estate settlement, noting that the burden of managing post-death finances falls disproportionately on women.
“What’s on the market is consumer-based,” Underwood explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “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.”
By embedding Prismm directly into the bank’s core infrastructure, the startup removes the cognitive and administrative load from the consumer. Rather than forcing families to navigate fragmented legal and banking silos while grieving, Prismm creates a streamlined pipeline where the necessary tools are already integrated into the accounts they use every day.
Combating Estate Attrition in the Banking Sector
Financial institutions lose billions of dollars globally each year to estate attrition. When an account holder dies without streamlined provisions for asset transfer, heirs routinely liquidate accounts and transfer the capital to alternative financial institutions offering better digital experiences or more supportive advisory services. For banks, this represents not only an immediate loss of capital under management but also the permanent severance of a relationship with the next generation of clients.
Prismm’s business model transforms this operational vulnerability into an aggressive customer retention and acquisition strategy. By streamlining inheritance, banks can retain existing deposits while simultaneously establishing early digital relationships with heirs before they move their inheritances elsewhere.
“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 noted. “We understand that you need to be proactive and build relationships with the next generation of consumers on the front end.”
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and Industry Implications
Prismm’s appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Startup Battlefield marks a major milestone for the femtech and fintech sectors. Gathering in San Francisco, California, hundreds of early-stage startups and venture capital investors have converged to showcase emerging technologies that promise to disrupt traditional industries. Prismm’s pitch highlights a growing shift in fintech toward deep infrastructure plays that solve unglamorous, back-office problems rather than surface-level consumer conveniences.
As the fintech ecosystem continues to evolve past basic digital banking apps and payment processors, infrastructure startups addressing generational wealth transfer are poised for rapid valuation growth. With trillions of dollars projected to change hands from Baby Boomers to Millennials and Generation Z over the coming decades—often referred to in financial circles as the Great Wealth Transfer—tools like Prismm’s are transitioning from luxury add-ons to essential compliance and retention necessities for modern banks.
The Startup Battlefield competition concludes with the announcement of the overall winner. Regardless of whether Prismm claims the top prize in San Francisco, the startup has successfully highlighted a massive blind spot in legacy banking operations, positioning itself as an indispensable bridge for the future of multi-generational finance.
