Episode Transcript

Speakers: Craig Andrews, Martha Underwood, Bluesman Grendel and the Compliance Choir, Production Music

[0:00 - 0:35] Craig Andrews: You never know how much time you have. For me, that stopped being an idea and became reality on August 22nd, 2021. The doctors put me on a ventilator and told my wife to call hospice so she could prepare for the day they planned to pull the plug. Six weeks later, I woke up to an entirely different reality. I could not walk, I could not talk, I could not even lift my own arm, and I woke up realizing something else, I had not made the right preparations for my family. The plans I thought were pretty good fell through when it mattered most.
[0:35 - 1:18] Craig Andrews: That is why fiduciary alchemy welcomes voices that would have warned me about the holes in my plans. My hope is that you live a long and prosperous life, but I also hope you make better plans than I did. So tune in, take notes, and stay with us through the end when bluesman grindle and the compliance choir. Giving a word of caution. Today I want to welcome Martha Underwood. She is the founder and CEO of Prism. Prism is a digital vault platform built around wealth transfer and legacy planning. This puts Martha right at the intersection of advisors, families.
[1:18 - 1:39] Craig Andrews: Privacy and the practical realities of passing information from one generation to the next. You may think you have everything nailed down in your will and your trust. But there's a little detail that can really bite you, and we're going to be talking about that today. Martha, welcome. Thank you.
[1:40 - 1:41] Martha Underwood: Thank you for having me, Craig.
[1:42 - 2:05] Craig Andrews: So, I, You know, we've chatted once before, and it was just such a delightful chat, and I'm looking forward to this. And… but one of the things you told me… told me a story about your dad, and it kind of motivated… the journey that you're on. Tell me, would you mind reminding me what happened?
[2:05 - 2:33] Martha Underwood: Sure, sure. So happy to be here. And I'm a daddy's girl. My mom and dad have been traditional family, married 64 years, and in 2017, after Hurricane Irma, a neighbor had a large tree fall on the roof. And my dad went over, being the helpful guy he is, with his chainsaw, got on the roof. Started cutting it off, but slips, falls off the roof, and goes unconscious.
[2:34 - 2:34] Craig Andrews: Mmhm.
[2:35 - 3:16] Martha Underwood: I am in Birmingham, Alabama at the time, and they're in Miami, Florida, and my mom calls me, and she's frantic, and they get to the hospital, and they're peppering her with questions, mainly, like, how is she going to pay? And so she calls us back and she's just like, hey, has your dad ever talked to you about where the finances are because he's handled everything? And my sister and I were like, no, he hasn't. So we were flying blind. And that was a wake up call for us. Thank God he ended up being okay. But that was the moment that we said we needed to ensure that we knew where all of his assets were. So if this ever happened again, mom will be taken care of.
[3:18 - 3:23] Craig Andrews: So, how long was he out?
[3:24 - 3:57] Martha Underwood: For about a day. Oh, my! So that's that. So that that's a long time, right? So he's kind of like in and out, and we didn't know what the issues were. He was 77 at the time, so he's older. And after they ran all of the tests and everything else, he had broken ribs and had some pockets in his lungs, so he was in ICU trauma for a while, but he came to later that evening. And thank God he did, so it was a near miss, but we're happy to report that he is healthy as ever today.
[3:58 - 4:08] Craig Andrews: Oh, that's awesome. So… After that, what were the actions? You know, what actions did you all take as a family to make sure that didn't happen again?
[4:09 - 4:52] Martha Underwood: Yes. So when he came to, we just started asking him for like the names of his financial advisor, because we knew he had one. It was funny because we just knew his name was like Guillermo, and we had never met him. But he always talked about this person who handled all the finances. So that was first order of businesses. Who is he? Where is he? And let's get a catalog of all where the assets are. And then we started asking him like where's his file folder and went and went through the file folder and pulled all of the where the assets were then where the bills were where the liabilities were and because I'm in technology I kind of created a platform that allowed me and my siblings to share this information.
[4:52 - 5:31] Martha Underwood: But also safeguard some of the information from some of the other siblings because not everyone needed to know everything and my dad is still very private and every sibling or every child has a role to play and so I made sure that I built in. The privacy guardrails so that the siblings that needed to see what they needed to see could, and the ones that didn't need to see it didn't. And so that was the the path that we took so that we can access it digitally. And that's important because I wasn't in Miami when the event happened. I was in Birmingham, and so I needed to be able to put my hands on it quickly.
[5:31 - 5:39] Martha Underwood: And that's why it was important for us to digitize all of that information, and then share it across the family, because we're spread out across the United States.
[5:39 - 6:10] Craig Andrews: Yes. Yeah, I mean, I know from… from my own coma, one of the… one of the problems that came up was, Nobody knew my passwords and. I'd actually taken actions before. I'd added my stepson to my password manager account, and he had access to all my passwords. He just forgot they had them. And, you know, I wasn't out for a day. I was out for 6 weeks. And even when I woke up, I wasn't real clear in the head.
[6:10 - 6:59] Martha Underwood: Yeah, sure. And what we forget is, during these moments, we forget the emotional toll. right? And when you are in an emotional state, you will have brain fog. You will not be thinking straight, because in that heightened emotional state you're thinking about the well-being of the person you care about. You're thinking about family. You're thinking about all of the other things. So while you did the right thing, and your son had that. Access, we forget. that we go into this fight or flight and just like, oh, my goodness, I don't know where anything is. I don't know what to do. I'm freezing because my loved one is not well. Right. But then you also have people like in our family that, like, I'm the one that typically goes into action. I can compartmentalize those emotions.
[6:59 - 7:28] Martha Underwood: And then I'm thinking through, okay, what do we need to do to make sure the family is taken care of, mom is taken care of, all of that. And sometimes you have that in the family and sometimes you don't. But I can see how your stepson might have forgotten that because there are moments where we're like, where we were like, oh my goodness, it hit us like dad is down. Right. And in that moment, you're… you're just trying to sift through those emotions, so… I… I get it. It's a complex thing to have to navigate.
[7:29 - 7:37] Craig Andrews: Yeah, and you know, and this is somewhat of a different scenario, but I think there's a principle that still applies. You know, years ago I used to play soccer.
[7:37 - 7:38] Martha Underwood: Okay.
[7:38 - 8:05] Craig Andrews: And one day in the middle of the game, I quit sweating. And which is like a definite sign that you're about to go into heat stroke. It's a very, very bad sign. And, you know, I… Didn't really think about it. It didn't hit me until 8 hours later. that was on the edge of heat strip. Well, I'd spent 6 years in the Marines, and they trained us to recognize these things. And it really shocked me that in the moment.
[8:05 - 8:06] Martha Underwood: Yep.
[8:06 - 8:29] Craig Andrews: I don't know. Just didn't, I didn't register how much trouble I was in. And, yeah. And so I think that's kind of the same thing when, you know, like when your dad fell off, you know, the roof. It's, it's a panicked, it's a chaotic, it' A state where you're not thinking at your best.
[8:30 - 9:05] Martha Underwood: That's correct. That's correct. And that's why. I said, when he came to. all right, there's so many of us. Some of us have our different skill sets of what we can do and go and spring into action. If this ever happens again. Or if there's an accident with mom, we need to be able to have a mechanism to know what the documents are because life is document driven. If I'm going to the doctor, I have to fill out documents and I need that information. And if that person is incapacitated, I can't get that information from them.
[9:05 - 9:34] Martha Underwood: And that's… and that's critical for us to be able to care for our loved ones. And so, ensuring that we had access across the board for it was so key for me, because I did not want to be in that position again, because it felt helpless. Like, I need to handle this, and I don't have the right information to make the right decisions. And that was the key thing. We just didn't know where things were to make the right decisions. And now we do.
[9:35 - 9:43] Craig Andrews: Mmhm So, and is that, I'm guessing that's Prism, the system that you built.
[9:43 - 10:24] Martha Underwood: Yeah, it is because the other thing is, yes, I have this personal experience. But, I was also head of retail software engineering at a global bank during COVID. And so we know a lot of people unexpectedly died during Covid, and when they did we saw a lot of People come into the bank looking for the assets. And most of the time, or more times than not. The beneficiary information on the account was stale. You know, they weren't updated, so we were like, our hands are tied, you're not the person listed here, or there's no beneficiary at all.
[10:24 - 11:04] Martha Underwood: and we couldn't administer some of the funds that we wanted to, just because the information was incorrect. And that's when I connected it to mine because yeah, we called the banks and we did everything and yeah, my mom is on it, but I was like, oh, I'm not on it. My sisters aren't on as a beneficiary. All of these things needed to be updated. And so that's when it hit me that this isn't just a family organization problem. It's like an infrastructure system problem, financial system problem, because we've built these platforms and systems for wealth accumulation, wealth growth, wealth tracking.
[11:04 - 11:27] Martha Underwood: But we really haven't built the rails or the infrastructure for wealth transfer. It's still very complex, it's still very manual, and And that's why I saw this as a bigger problem. and said, oh man, I created this for myself, but now I can actually create it for the masses. And that's really where Prism was born, because I saw it at scale.
[11:28 - 11:40] Craig Andrews: So some people are sitting there, you know, are listening and they're saying, well, you know, I have a will or I have a trust, all of that's in place. That issue is handled. Is that necessarily true?
[11:40 - 12:23] Martha Underwood: Yes and no. So you've done half of it, right? The other thing is, you've done what you're supposed to do. You have written and made sure that your wishes on what happens to your assets are known. But the challenge there is, you don't know how it's executed, or whether it's going to be executed the way it should be executed. And in addition to that, because we're moving from this online offline world to online world digitizing it. You need to make sure that someone has access to it. A lot of times people were like, oh, I can't find the will, or I can't find the trust because it's in some box somewhere in grandma's, you know.
[12:23 - 13:11] Martha Underwood: homestead. And so making sure that someone else has access to it is number is number one. But number 2 is thinking through how the execution of it will work. Because that's the challenge. You've written down the instructions, but a lot of times, there are challenges with closing the account, ensuring that the beneficiary is set, because a lot of times, the beneficiary The account holder beneficiary relationship supersedes the will, and people don't realize that. And so they think that they just have their will done, and that's okay, but they forgot to make sure that the beneficiaries on these accounts are current and not stale. So that's a key missing piece that I think… one of the things we do is educate people on that.
[13:11 - 13:16] Craig Andrews: Yes, let's, let's dig in. Let's understand that a little bit more. Let's, let's play out a scenario.
[13:16 - 13:17] Martha Underwood: Sure.
[13:19 - 13:36] Craig Andrews: Let's say that your dad's well, you know, your mom and dad's well, let's say, you know, something happens to him. And… They have some money in, let's say, money in this one account that's gonna go to you.
[13:36 - 13:37] Martha Underwood: Yep.
[13:37 - 13:43] Craig Andrews: According to the well. But the bank has your sister's name. on that, okay?
[13:43 - 13:44] Martha Underwood: As I'.
[13:44 - 13:46] Craig Andrews: Beneficiary. What happens?
[13:46 - 13:47] Martha Underwood: My sister gets the money.
[13:48 - 13:50] Craig Andrews: But the will says you get the money.
[13:51 - 14:32] Martha Underwood: Right, but the law, from an account holder at the bank, the account holder-beneficiary relationship supersedes that will. The will typically handles stuff. right things. That will transfer to whoever you designate it to transfer to, but from a banking perspective, the account holder. beneficiary relationship will supersede that will. So my dad might have said, oh, I'm at Acme Bank, and Martha should get all the money in Acme Bank, and I wrote that in my will, but she put my sis… but on… when she… he signed up for the account, put my sister's beneficiary.
[14:32 - 15:08] Martha Underwood: I can't go to that bank and say, hey, here's my will, here's the will, give me the money out of the account, because that's… I'm not the beneficiary of record. My sister is. And that's who he designated as the person to get the money when he opened the account. Or, even if he updated it. Right? If he updated it and said, oh, I have her sister there, and now I'm gonna put her brother there, 50-50%, but Martha's in my will, so she'll get, she'll get some too, or whatever, like, they'll work it out. Nope, Martha gets nothing.
[15:08 - 15:17] Martha Underwood: My brother and my sister gets 50%, 50%, because that is what is of record. At the bank on that account, financial account.
[15:19 - 15:31] Craig Andrews: So, again, just kind of playing this out, I mean, if I'm sitting there and I'm going to the bank, I'm saying, hey, look, here's the will. What are they going to tell me? How are they going to argue against that? Well.
[15:31 - 15:54] Martha Underwood: Yeah, they're not going to argue. They're going to tell you what the statutes are and say that, I'm sorry, you know, he might have put you there in the will for this account, but he didn't update this. Beneficiary signatory card. that has you listed. It has your brother and your sister listed, so by law. I have to disperse those funds to them.
[15:55 - 15:56] Craig Andrews: Wow.
[15:57 - 16:03] Craig Andrews: That's, that could really screw some things up. So how do you keep, how do you keep all this in sync?
[16:04 - 16:43] Martha Underwood: Yeah, so one of the things that we do from a platform perspective is we have a beneficiary mapping tool for banks to deploy. That helps account holders what we call self-service, because if you've ever had to change the beneficiary on any one of your accounts, it's you go to the bank, you fill out the form, and you submit it, and then the back office submits or updates it, and it writes to what we call the core of the banking system. So the brain of the bank. Some banks mail you a form that you would update the beneficiary, you mail it back.
[16:45 - 17:19] Martha Underwood: And that can be a challenge, because it's still all manual, right? It doesn't really allow you to seamlessly update and keep that in track across your accounts. So, one of the things that we did with Prism was said, first order of business is to help people ensure that their beneficiaries stay in sync across their accounts. Because I might have created a account, you know, 20 years ago when I didn't have kids, and I just never updated that account because it was at a credit union that I loved, and I never updated it.
[17:19 - 17:54] Martha Underwood: And same for some of the other accounts. Average American has, you know, 4 different accounts. And so, how do I make sure that the beneficiaries are in sync across that, are in sync across my 401 s, my pensions, and all of my other accounts? And so, with that, we send you reminders through whatever bank that you bank with that has the beneficiary module. To say, update this, your beneficiaries, and make sure they're not stale every year at your main bank, but then remember to contact your other institutions directly to ensure that they're updated as well.
[17:55 - 18:04] Craig Andrews: Now, how do how do your wealth manager and your attorney and all those folks tie into the system?
[18:04 - 18:47] Martha Underwood: Yeah, so they, would typically get what we call our Prism Anchor product, which allows them to have a dashboard of all of their clients. And with that dashboard of all of their clients, it will show what we would call trusted persons or beneficiaries. At the top level and at the account level. and we send them notifications, and we'll show them like, Hey, we see in the system that this account hasn't doesn't have a beneficiary. It triggers you as a financial advisors to call them or do something. The good news is most wealth advisors and financial advisors, they are on top of this because they realize that this is their next generation of customers.
[18:47 - 19:01] Martha Underwood: coming in. But there isn't a a good system of record for them. to see it across their book of business. And that's 1 of the things that prism helps them with is to be able to see that across their book of business.
[19:02 - 19:18] Craig Andrews: Wow. So, How does it work in terms of does the financial advisor have to pay for an account and the individual pay for an account? How does how's that all that work?
[19:18 - 19:57] Martha Underwood: Yeah, it just depends on the financial advisor. They would pay a yearly subscription fee. And they can offer it to their customers or their clients as an add-on, as a benefit. We do have some financial advisors that do that. That they just purchased it and they added on as a benefit to their client. And there are some that charge the… the, client a nominal fee for it. per vault, but then they manage it as well. So we try to make it as easy as possible for the financial advisor to administer and maintain it.
[19:57 - 20:09] Craig Andrews: So the center point kind of the, you know, the epicenter of of this is it's going through the financial advisor. Yeah. And and they're making sure it's tied into your banks to and how does.
[20:09 - 20:43] Martha Underwood: No, so we make sure it's tied into the banks, right? So we have what we would call APIs and integrations into the banks so we can surface all of the accounts for that financial advisor. The only thing the financial advisor is doing is offering it as a product to their client. And they'll send them an invite to it and say, hey, we're now a Prism customer. And this is a value add that we are providing now to all of our clients. You send them an invite, the client accepts it, they set their account up, and now they're connected to you and you can see all of the things, because on the back end.
[20:44 - 20:48] Martha Underwood: We would have already had all of the hooks into the banks and everything else.
[20:49 - 20:53] Craig Andrews: And how about the attorney, you know, the estate planning attorney?
[20:53 - 20:54] Martha Underwood: Yeah, so the estate…
[20:54 - 20:54] Craig Andrews: I am.
[20:55 - 21:36] Martha Underwood: They tie in, because after the event happens, or even before the event happens, you can invite them to your vault, and allow them to see all of the documents, and they can see where there's deltas, and they can be like, oh, you're missing this, or you need to update this document. And so they can do that proactively and then after a death happens, so after a death happens. can say, alright, the death has happened, I need you to settle this estate, I'm inviting you to the account, you have every piece of information you need. You know where all the accounts are, you know what the NAS balance was, you have all of the documents to be able to manage everything, and so it makes it really seamless for them, so they don't have to go hunt for documents.
[21:36 - 21:46] Martha Underwood: or subpoena banks to see where your assets are, and it really saves that family money. From having to pay hourly fees for just searching for where assets are.
[21:47 - 21:50] Craig Andrews: Okay. And…
[21:52 - 22:12] Craig Andrews: How do people, so kind of going back to the problem that I had, you know, where I gave my stepson access to all my passwords and they forgot. How do you handle that situation, that… to make sure that When somebody passes, they know… Who do you know who the central point of contact is to coordinate all this.
[22:12 - 22:47] Martha Underwood: Yeah, so one of the things we talk about a lot is a lot of the systems aren't designed for absence. And so you were, you were essentially absent, so you could not log into your account. And so what would have happened is you'd had a prism account. Your stepson would have had his own login to it, and if he would have forgotten his password, it's just a matter of resetting his password. We send him a new one, he logs in, and now he has access to where all of your accounts are, where all of your information is, all of the instructions that you left for him, and now he can execute against that.
[22:47 - 23:01] Craig Andrews: Yeah, and so, like, my situation was he had his own account, so I, you know, I have a business, password, you know, I have a password manager for the business, I have different users, so he had his own account, had his own login, but he just forgot.
[23:02 - 23:06] Martha Underwood: Yeah. So that's the thing. Like, he should have been able to reset his password for.
[23:06 - 23:08] Craig Andrews: I forgot he even had access.
[23:08 - 23:17] Martha Underwood: So now that, that is, that's something deeper then, right? That's again, that shock and that's.
[23:18 - 24:00] Martha Underwood: Oh, I don't know where this is, but that's where your wife or someone else can be like, hey, remember, you have access to this. Didn't Dad give you access to this? Can you check? And he's like, oh, I do. I have my own login. Let me go through the process of resetting everything. The other thing that we do is We send a lot of emails and documentation, so if he would have logged into his email. he would have saw one or a old email and be like, Oh, man, I remember I have access to Dad's information. So now I can log in and do that because we'll send you reminders. Make sure your information is updated, especially going into the holiday season. There's a lot of reminders that go out.
[24:00 - 24:23] Martha Underwood: because people are going to be sitting around the Thanksgiving in the in the Christmas table with grandma, with parents, and This is going to be a topic of discussion. And so we're going to be sending information to guide them through that. And that's where he would have been on that list. And just checking his email randomly, it would have triggered him and said, oh, man, I do have access to this. Let me go make sure I can get into it.
[24:24 - 24:45] Craig Andrews: Okay. Well, this is really fascinating and I, I love how all this started with, with your dad, something very unfortunate with your dad, but. I mean, that's like the classic entrepreneurial journey. You see something broken in the world, you set out to fix it. Martha, how can people reach you?
[24:45 - 24:58] Martha Underwood: They can reach me at getprism.com. They can also reach me at LinkedIn. I'll just find me at Martha Underwood. And they can email me at martha at getprism.com.
[24:59 - 25:02] Craig Andrews: Well, excellent. Well, thanks for coming on Fiduciary Alch.
[25:02 - 25:04] Martha Underwood: Oh, it's been a pleasure, Craig. It really has.
[25:07 - 25:41] Craig Andrews: Thank you for tuning in to fiduciary alchemy, the coolest financial podcast you're likely to find. We go looking for voices like the one you just heard, because I want you to dodge the mistakes that I made and learn it without the coma, without the drama, without nearly paying the man. I don't know why I lived when so many others died, that part's still a mystery. Now some folks ask, Craig, what is it you do? Well, I'm telling you now that's no mystery at all. We solve hard marketing problems in crowded markets, so good folks like our guests can
[25:41 - 26:18] Craig Andrews: rise above the noise, become visible, memorable, irresistible, and grow like never before. If organic growth is your problem, reach out, call me. Let's make a plan and bring your next steps into the light. But don't leave yet. Stick around a minute more and listen to Bluesman Grendel and the compliance choir deliver a word of caution. Next for you.
[26:18 - 27:42] Bluesman Grendel and the Compliance Choir: This podcast is for information, education, that is all. It is not financial tax or legal advice to guide your call. Nothing here is an offer, nothing here is a buy or sell, no recommendation, no solicitation. I'm saying it plain and well, plain and well, plain and well, past performance ain't no promise of what tomorrow brings. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain.
[27:42 - 28:36] Bluesman Grendel and the Compliance Choir: I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain.
[28:36 - 29:47] Bluesman Grendel and the Compliance Choir: I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain and well, but I'm saying it plain. Get your own financial tax and legal help before you make your move. That's the compliance rule. Informational only. Educational to get qualified financial tax and legal advice. That is right for you.
[29:59 - 30:02] Production Music: (dramatic music)