When a customer dies, heirs often move the bank inherited money to another institution. Prismm is a startup that helps banks prevent that by building beneficiary and estate planning into accounts from day one.
The Problem Banks Face: Estate Attrition
Financial institutions lose billions in deposits to “estate attrition” every year. This happens when heirs move inherited money to other institutions because banks have no system for managing the transition 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, within their institution.
How Prismm Was Founded
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 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.
“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 said in an interview with TechCrunch. “It’s still very much all manual. 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.”
How Prismm Works
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.
“What’s on the market is consumer-based,” Underwood said. “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 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.”
Prismm’s Three Core Products
The company has two central products, with a third in development.
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.
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 people. It’s offered through financial institutions, so users can manage everything without needing a separate consumer app.
Prismm Continuity is coming soon. It will guide staff and families through the transfer process step by step. The startup says this will keep the hardest part of the process within the institution rather than putting the burden on families.
Why Banks Should Care About Inherited Money
Underwood and Sylla describe Prismm as infrastructure that helps banks handle what happens when a customer dies. They say financial institutions lose billions in deposits to “estate attrition” every year, which is when heirs move inherited money to other institutions, because banks have no system for managing the transition 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, within their institution.
“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 said. “We understand that you need to be proactive and build relationships with the next generation of consumers on the front end.”
What’s Next for Prismm
As banks look for ways to retain the bank inherited money and build lasting relationships with heirs, Prismm’s infrastructure approach offers a proactive solution. By integrating beneficiary and estate planning directly into bank accounts, the startup aims to make the transfer of assets less complicated for families and more profitable for financial institutions.
