Bank of Memories Preserves Ukraine’s Fallen Heroes and Digital Legacies

Iryna Savytska is the CEO and co-founder of Bank of Memories, a Ukraine-based digital memorial and family-archive initiative. She leads projects preserving video stories, photographs, voices, documents, and digital legacies for families of fallen Ukrainian soldiers and veterans. Working with municipalities, government partners, bereaved families, and international organizations, Savytska advances secure, decentralized remembrance systems, memorial films, digital wills, biometric protection, export rights, and scalable content-management tools for communities affected by war throughout wartime Ukraine today.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Iryna Savytska about Bank of Memories, its origins, wartime expansion, and growing public demand. Savytska explains how municipalities fund memorial films for fallen Ukrainian soldiers and veterans, accessed through QR codes at local remembrance sites. She also discusses decentralized archives, family trees, digital wills, password inheritance, biometric security, and a content-management system enabling municipalities to produce films independently. The interview highlights remembrance, identity, social entrepreneurship, and digital legacy preservation across Ukraine.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, so today we are here with Iryna Savytska, CEO and co-founder of Bank of Memories, a Ukrainian memory-preservation startup. Bank of Memories is a digital archive project for preserving family, civic, and historical memory. It can help create digital memorials for fallen Ukrainian soldiers and veterans, while also working with municipalities on broader memory-preservation projects. The platform is designed as a private archive that can include features such as biometric protection, an AI-assisted family tree, decentralized storage, semantic search, memory-based chat functions, export options, and a digital will. Is all of that factual and correct?

Iryna Savytska: At its core, Bank of Memories is a tool for the living. It is a secure digital space where families can build their family trees and preserve their stories, important documents, and legacy for future generations. Because of the ongoing war, we adapted this technology to help municipalities create memorial films to honor our heroes. However, our global mission has always been to capture and celebrate life, not just to document loss.

Each municipality controls its own budget and serves its own citizens. For them, this is a memory-preservation project. How does it work? Imagine there are 100 families who have lost someone in the war, a soldier or veteran. For those fallen heroes, we create short memorial films, three to five minutes long.

All of these films are preserved in our system and are accessible through QR codes in small cities, villages, and other communities. Maybe you have heard of the Alleys of Heroes found in many Ukrainian cities and villages.

Jacobsen: I have seen some of those while travelling through different cities in Ukraine.

Savytska: Yes. Those are physical places where people can come to remember their relatives and friends. We place QR codes there so visitors can scan them and watch a memorial film about each person. As I said, the films are three to five minutes long.

This is not on our main website because it is a social impact project that we run here in Ukraine. We had planned to scale it to other countries and offer these films internationally in the future, but right now we are quite busy here in Ukraine.

By the way, we were invited by the New York InsurTech Accelerator to help promote this idea in the United States. They were looking for similar solutions for grief management, memorial films, secure preservation, and inheritance.

That is important for them as well, so this is not only relevant in Ukraine, but abroad too.

Jacobsen: Was this primarily a result of wartime necessity and reflection, or were elements of the idea already developing before the war?

Savytska: It began before the war. The idea began when my husband's mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. We acutely felt the need to preserve her voice, her unique life stories, and her experiences while she was still with us—to create a digital time capsule of who she was. Later, after she passed away, we also faced a practical issue: we lost access to many of her documents and passwords. That’s when we realized people need a comprehensive service that combines emotional memory preservation with practical digital asset management.

The idea was to create a secure system that does not depend on any single company or government, runs independently on decentralized infrastructure, and can preserve people's digital legacies over time.

We wanted to make it as affordable as possible. The memorial film was the final step in that journey. People upload data, build their family tree, and keep everything in one place. Then, when they pass away, we can create a film about them. That was the initial idea.

Then the full-scale war started, and we realized that people needed this immediately. We could not wait until all the systems were created and everything worked perfectly. We decided to start with films for our friends whom we unfortunately lost during the war.

Then the mayor of Kalush, a city in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, saw our films and said, "I want this for my city as soon as possible." We delivered these films to the citizens there who needed them. Then another city said they wanted them too, and we realized that this was something people actually needed, not only families, but municipalities as well. They wanted to pay for it.

In Ukraine, it is quite rare for someone from the government to want to pay you. It is not the usual model. We started working and realized that this project is a form of social impact entrepreneurship. It has a social pricing model, and we are also creating and measuring social impact. In the United States, I know there are structures such as B Corps, but in Ukraine, there is nothing similar.

We are working as an LLC and NGO together to make this happen. Abroad, we have a company in Delaware to serve the international market. There, it is a business, but still with impact. Here in Ukraine, it is purely social impact.

Jacobsen: What is the level of demand for this? Some people want to keep memory alive physically through various memorabilia. Others would like the digital representation and repository that you provide. Others may not know about it, or they may not want it. So there are four different groups. Given the scale of this particular war, even one of those groups could represent huge demand. How are you finding people coming to you, and what is the level of demand? Also, what is most in demand among the services Bank of Memories provides?

Savytska: Before the full-scale war, even though the war had been going on since 2014, we launched our first pilot in 2019, and no one liked it. We made a film for our friend, showed it, and installed his portrait at his school and workplace with a QR code. People did not show much interest. That was because there was no war in Kyiv, for example. There was no war elsewhere in the same direct way, apart from Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. So people did not treat it seriously then.

For a couple of years, we did not do much with it. Then, in 2022, it exploded. Why? Because the war touched every family.

During the Soviet period and after 1991, especially in the 1990s, it was a very hard time. People were trying to make money and survive. I was born in 1988, so I clearly remember that my family was working hard to make money. The same was true for many other families. Culture and memory were not priorities because people needed to survive.

The same was true in 2014, for example. People did not need to survive in quite the same way, but they were still focused more on money than on culture or heritage.

Then, in 2022, everything changed dramatically and quickly. Something similar happened with COVID. There was COVID, and then, suddenly, within a month, there was no COVID. It was similar with culture. There had been no focus on culture, and then, within a month after the full-scale war started, people realized, “We are Ukrainians. We want to preserve our nationality. We want to preserve our identity and who we are.”

The most popular products we now have under the Bank of Memories umbrella are the memorial films and the system itself. We also offer our protocol to other municipalities. We teach them how to do it, and they can create films on their own. That is quite popular in Ukraine because municipalities do not want to pay a lot of money, but they are ready to pay for the content management system we created. They pay less than $1,000 per year to create everything for their community.

Another product is a digital will. Right now, it is very popular. Even though the older generation is often afraid to make a will because they think that if they do it, they will die the next day, the younger generation here, people from my generation and people over 40, realize that they actually have something to lose. They may have contracts, intellectual property, loans they have given to someone, and other assets. So they have something they want to share.

Modern individuals possess a vast amount of digital capital—from social media and family photo archives to intellectual property and investments. We made our digital will free for Ukrainians because, especially now, we want to promote a culture of responsibility. Creating a digital will today is like wearing a seatbelt or having insurance. It’s not about expecting the worst; it’s a modern, mature way to care for your loved ones, ensuring your life’s work and assets don’t end up locked away forever. We want to share that international culture with them and say that it is normal to write down everything that matters.

Then, if something happens and a person passes away, their family can automatically receive the important information by email or phone. I do not mean an apartment or other tangible assets. I mean, for example, passwords and digital access. I will share a link with you, and you will be able to make the will too.

For example, we explain how to share passwords for Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, iCloud, and similar services, and how to access them. Apparently, it is easy, but people are not doing it. I do not know why. Maybe they do not think about it. We are the first point that prompts them to actually think about it and write down where physical photos are, such as family pictures, and how to find them.

There may also be contracts with someone. Some people here are angel investors. They may have invested somewhere, but no one knows where they invested, in which country, or in which company. If something happens and the family has the contracts, then they can inherit those assets. If not, and no one can find them, then those assets can become frozen. So those are the two main products that are quite popular.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Iryna.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBNs: 978–1–0692343, 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). An accomplished journalist, his portfolio includes over 10,000 publications across 200+ outlets, including International Policy Digest, The Humanist, Basic Income Earth Network, Humanist Perspectives, and rabble.ca. He has served in leadership and board roles across global media and humanist organizations and holds memberships with the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada, and Reporters Without Borders.

Image Credit: Scott Douglas Jacobsen.