My experience at
Treasury Prime

About Treasury Prime

Treasury Prime is an API-first banking software platform that enables banks to extend their account and payment services to fintech and embedded banking clients. This allows banks to take on new types of customers and generate new sources of deposits and income.

This has allowed Treasury Prime to build the largest network of bank partners in their space, sometimes referred to as "Banking-as-a-Service."

Fintechs companies in the United States are legally obliged to partner with a chartered bank to hold deposits for their customers. Before the Treasury Prime bank network, those direct-to-bank partnerships were infeasibly costly and complex for all but the largest fintechs to take on.

Treasury Prime integrates with their bank partners' core and payment gateways, allowing fintech clients to call the API to open accounts, move money, issue cards, and more. On top of that, they provide the tooling that those banks and fintech clients need to view and manage their API banking activity.

Summary

  • Banking API platform, founded 2017
  • Allows banks to support fintech clients
  • Largest network of BaaS banks in US
  • 15+ bank partners, 70+ clients
  • treasuryprime.com

My Roles at Treasury Prime

I joined Treasury Prime as a fractional designer when the company exited YC in summer 2018. My responsibilities included early definition of our visual branding and web presence, working with bank partners to scope MVP frontend offerings, and creating our fundraising pitch decks.

After raising a series A in early 2020, I joined full time as Treasury Prime’s Director of Design and 13th employee, responsible for all design efforts.

Initially, I was a team of one, representing design and product management on our executive team. While a solo designer, my work included launching our public Sandbox Developer Dashboard, white label commercial account onboarding for banks, white label Dashboards for banks, updated bank tooling, and a PPP loan origination and forgiveness application.

After raising a series B, I hired three more product and brand designers onto our team. Together, we further refined our brand and made numerous improvements to our bank and fintech tooling.

As the company grew, my role evolved to focus more on product management. I helped define the PM role at Treasury Prime while we built out a team, retaining direct responsibility for product design, our frontend products, data products, compliance products, and documentation.

I was later promoted to a group PM position, with half of our product team reporting to me, with our collective responsibility growing to include payments and platform infrastructure.
2023-'24
Group Product Manager
Managed Product Design team & PM group. Responsible for payments, data, platform development, and marketing website work.
2018-'20
Product Designer
Fractional brand and product design definition.
2021-'23
Senior Product Manager
Managed Product Design team. Responsible for frontend, data, compliance, tooling, and documentation work.
2020-'21
Director of Design
Hired and led combined product and brand design team.

My Work at Treasury Prime

Below you'll find just a few of the things that I worked on while I was at Treasury Prime, and the impact that they had. For more in-depth case studies, let's talk.

Platform Applications

2019-2024
Over the years, my team designed, launched, and honed numerous iterations of our frontend applications for bank partners and fintechs clients.

I designed and scoped the early versions of our applications closely with bank partners. Our first Bank Console narrly allowed performing manual review of account applications submitted through our API and our white-label commercial onboarding app. And from there, it grew to support full visibility and management of accounts, payment rails, and bank↔fintech relationships in production and test environments.

Our first fintech Developer Dashboard started as a white-label Sandbox to serve as a vector for sales lead generation and became the primary tooling for self-service testing and visibility into our API platform for fintech engineering and support operations staff.
5k
Sandbox leads generated
1500
Production users
Having broad customer adoption of our dashboards was critical in our strategy to drive adoption of new payment rails, controls, and review workflows as we matured the API platform.

When I left Treasury Prime in Q1'24, we were in the process of launching a new consolidated app for banks and fintech clients with a full UI redesign and new backend infrastructure.

Treasury Prime Website & Brand

2018-2024
For much of my tenure at Treasury Prime I was responsible for the company's branding (visual, voice, & product content), and our web presence (design, implementation, management).

As Treasury Prime found product-market fit, we iterated on our branding to better suit our target audiences, adding greater emphasis on the supportive relationships we facilitate, as well as illustrating complex concepts through precise examples.

In our early years, I personally built our website in Webflow, to make our marketing more nimble. This allowed me to single-handedly maintain our marketing website operations and development.

The website was responsible for capturing the vast majority of our sales leads, with traffic sourced primarily from online word of mouth within the fintech and banking community.
90%
of all SQLs were captured through treasuryprime.com
After a botched marketing-run full rebrand, I subsequently retook ownership of our website, helping roll out a full site and branding refresh. This work was in progress at the time of my departure from Treasury Prime.

Transaction Monitoring

2023
As part of my work as PM leading our data engineering team, I helped improve our compliance position by designing and launching a fully standardized integration with our monitoring partners.

This reduced the cost and complexity of launching new partner integrations resulting in:
3 new
partner integration
50%+
customer adoption
$100k+
revenue share

Network Transfers

2023
In early 2023 Treasury Prime launched a proprietary payment rail called Network Transfers, allowing instant, cross-bank money movement within its network of banks.
‍
After a successful beta period, there was insufficient operational visibility into Network Transfer behavior for further banks to be comfortable with payment growth.

Together with product designer Yoann Chalet, we added dedicated features to our fintech and bank applications to observe and understand the money movement. Additionally, I worked with our data team to ensure completeness of data within our data warehouse product, Prime Data, for reporting and transaction monitoring.

These changes removed daily manual operations inefficiency from our team, and unblocked further growth and Network Transfer adoption.
$100M+
payment volume increase
$440k
influenced ARR

White Label Commercial Onboarding

2018-2022
Opening accounts for new business customers is historically difficult and costly for banks, requiring manual back-office effort and an onerous submission process for the customer. Despite this, commercial banking is frequently far more lucrative than retail banking.

Treasury Prime's early success with bank partners was due in part to our core integrations, APIs, and (importantly) frontend that allowed for originating business accounts on the bank's core much more quickly and cheaply.
‍
As PM and designer for our onboarding products, I worked with our early partners to scope and launch a responsive white label commercial onboarding web app with theming and configuration that could be customized to the needs of the specific bank, including core product codes, funding methods, KYC workflows, branding, and marketing needs.

Paired with the app, we launched our Bank Console app to allow bankers to perform manual review on applications that did not pass KYC, as well as our data warehouse product, Prime Data, to allow for easy tracking and reporting.

We launched with 3 bank partners, facilitating:
$4.5B
in deposits
75k
account applicatios

YC Quick Start

2021
In 2021 Treasury Prime ran an experimental program in partnership wit one of our bank partners to make it extremely easy for Y Combinator startups to start using real API banking services in just a few hours.

Leveraging our new virtual ledger and commercial onboarding app, we launched a workflow that could allow a fintech startup to get an operating account and API keys within minutes, and full banking access after successful wire funding and review by the bank.

This accelerated product package, termed Quick Start, allowed for API bank account opening, payment origination, and instant debit card issuing with pre-approved white-label card artwork and mailers.

The value of the Quick Start program was not its financial success (it was short-lived), but in the process experimentation, including: fixed terms and eliminating contract redlines; restrictive default payment limits; and preferential startup pricing.

Being very early stage startups, Quick Start clients ultimately churned due to going out of business.
$190k
total ARR
1120
accounts opened
The experiment of this program validated Treasury Prime's up-market focus, rather than seeking to capture early startup clients and grow with them. This proved prudent as funding for smaller fintech companies dried up in early 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent shock to venture markets.

PPP Loan Application & Forgiveness

2020-2021
In early 2020, Treasury Prime partnered with Radius Bank (later acquire by LendingClub) to support Radius' participation within the Paycheck Protection Program to originate COVID-19 relief loans to small businesses.

In just a few weeks, we designed and built a white-label application to allow Radius Bank to originate PPP loans. This resulted in significant revenue for Treasury Prime and significant loan volume for the bank
$2B
in loans originated
$1M+
revenue for Treasury Prime
Months later, we extended the product to handle the intake of loan forgiveness requests.