SAN FRANCISCO — As trillions of dollars prepare to shift from Baby Boomers to younger generations over the coming decades, financial institutions face an existential threat known quietly in the industry as "estate attrition." When an account holder passes away, traditional banking infrastructure offers little guidance or digital capability for asset transition. The result? Heirs routinely withdraw inherited funds, moving them to competing institutions and stripping banks of valuable deposits. Enter Prismm, a financial technology startup founded by industry veterans and sisters Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla. Making its debut on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Prismm has engineered a B2B SaaS solution that embeds beneficiary and estate-planning infrastructure directly into banking core systems. By digitizing and streamlining the inheritance process from day one, Prismm is not only solving an exhausting manual hurdle for grieving families—it is positioning banks to capture and retain the next generation of wealth. Main Facts: The Anatomy of Prismm’s Banking Infrastructure At its core, Prismm tackles a multi-billion-dollar market inefficiency by shifting asset transition from a manual, paper-heavy nightmare into a seamless digital workflow embedded directly into a bank’s existing architecture. Rather than treating estate planning as an afterthought or forcing consumers to download third-party, consumer-facing applications, Prismm integrates natively with financial institution core systems. The startup currently features a suite of two primary products, with a third in active development: Prismm Designate: A tool empowering banks to offer customers an intuitive, digital-first mechanism to update, track, and manage their beneficiaries directly through their existing banking portal, sharply cutting down administrative friction. Prismm Anchor: A secure, centralized repository hosted within the financial institution. It allows account holders to aggregate accounts, legal documents, property titles, and other assets across multiple institutions while granting controlled, pre-authorized access to designated heirs. Prismm Continuity (Coming Soon): An upcoming guided platform designed to walk both bank personnel and surviving family members through the arduous asset transfer process step-by-step, minimizing operational burdens on the institution and emotional strain on the family. By authenticating identities, gathering consent, and collecting supporting legal documents in advance, Prismm allows remote, digital transfers. This eliminates the need for heirs to visit brick-and-mortar branches across different states just to settle a deceased loved one’s accounts. Chronology: From Personal Trauma to Fintech Innovation The seed for Prismm was planted long before its official incorporation in 2020. Both co-founders accumulated decades of combined experience in banking and finance, but it was a personal emergency in 2017 that exposed the fragile underbelly of family wealth management. The 2017 Hurricane Irma Catalyst In September 2017, Hurricane Irma battered Miami, Florida. While helping clear a fallen tree from a neighbor’s roof, Martha Underwood and Shella Sylla’s father suffered a severe fall and was hospitalized. In the immediate chaos, the family faced a terrifying secondary crisis: their mother, who relied entirely on her husband to manage household finances, tax documents, and banking paperwork, had no idea where crucial financial information was stored. Neither Underwood nor Sylla knew either. Although their father ultimately made a full recovery, the terrifying blackout of critical financial data left an indelible mark on the sisters. The COVID-19 Pandemic Realization The idea transformed into a concrete business concept three years later, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Underwood was working inside a traditional bank, she witnessed a heartbreaking daily pattern. Families—often grieving spouses and children—would flood branches, scrambling blindly to locate hidden accounts, understand lingering bills, and figure out how to stabilize their financial footing. Recognizing that this was not merely an isolated family issue, but a systemic structural failure across the entire global financial ecosystem, the sisters united their financial acumen to launch Prismm in 2020. Supporting Data and the Crisis of "Estate Attrition" The financial stakes for traditional banking institutions are staggeringly high. Every year, commercial banks and credit unions lose billions of dollars in deposits to estate attrition. When an account holder dies without an intuitive, digitized pipeline for asset inheritance, surviving family members typically close the accounts and transfer the capital to wealth management firms, digital brokerages, or rival retail banks. The Great Wealth Transfer: Over the next two decades, an estimated $84 trillion in wealth will transfer from older generations to Millennials and Gen Z, marking the largest generational shift of assets in modern history. The Caregiver Burden: According to demographic research and behavioral insights highlighted by Prismm, women disproportionately shoulder the burden of managing estate logistics and elderly care while simultaneously balancing careers and raising children. Independent consumer apps fail because asking overburdened caregivers to manually maintain cross-institutional documents rarely succeeds. Infrastructure over Consumer Apps: By integrating directly into bank cores, Prismm bypasses the consumer apathy trap, making estate preparedness a frictionless byproduct of simply maintaining a bank account. Official Responses and Strategic Vision In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, co-founder Martha Underwood emphasized that the financial sector spent decades building ultra-sophisticated platforms for wealth generation and tracking, completely ignoring the inevitable endgame: the transition of that wealth. "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 explained. "It’s still very much all manual. And that’s when we said, ‘We can digitize this process.’" Underwood also pointed out why standalone, direct-to-consumer wealth apps ultimately fall short in moments of crisis. "What’s on the market is consumer-based," said Underwood. "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, this needs to be built as infrastructure, and there needs to be as little friction as possible." By embedding Prismm directly into the bank core, the company aims to become the foundational layer that bridges generational divides. "We will be the infrastructure that financial institutions use to move money to the next generation," Underwood added, "because we don’t only understand that you execute on the back end. We understand that you need to be proactive and build relationships with the next generation of consumers on the front end." Implications: Reshaping Retail Banking for the Decades Ahead Prismm’s appearance on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 highlights a broader evolution in fintech: moving away from flashy consumer-facing gimmicks and toward deep, structural B2B infrastructure that solves foundational operational flaws. For traditional banks, adopting solutions like Prismm offers a dual advantage. First, it drastically reduces the administrative and compliance overhead associated with managing deceased accounts. Second—and more importantly—it acts as an automated retention engine. By making the inheritance process frictionless, transparent, and empathetic, banks can capture the trust of the deceased customer’s heirs at a moment when those heirs are evaluating where to consolidate their newly acquired fortunes. As Prismm scales its offerings—transitioning from Designate and Anchor to the upcoming rollout of Continuity—the startup is well-positioned to turn a traditionally morbid and messy banking bottleneck into a generational relationship-building pipeline. Financial institutions that fail to adopt this infrastructure risk watching trillions of dollars quietly walk out their doors. Post navigation The Death of the CMO: Evolution, Extinction, or a Crisis of Our Own Making?
