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."

Fintech 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 design and web app product management.

My early work included launching our public Sandbox Developer Dashboard, white label commercial account application for banks, white label bank dashboards, 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 Treasury Prime formed a Product Management team, I was asked to help build out the team with direct responsibility for product design, our frontend products, data products, compliance products, API documentation, and web presence.

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
I was responsible for the design and development of all of Treasury Prime's customer-facing applications, supporting:
15+
Bank partners
100+
Fintechs clients
Our frontend applications were crucial to Treasury Prime's early traction with banks and our fintech clients. At critical points in the company's growth, these apps allowed us to:
And most importantly, our frontend applications operationally enabled the bank↔fintech partnerships that are the core of Treasury Prime's business model.
Screenshot of Treasury Prime's first Sandbox Developer Dashboard. Shows basic onboarding for anyone to create API keys and start calling the API.
Our first Developer Dashboard allowed prospects to quickly create API keys and start using the API in a self-service Sandbox environment.
We took pride in our homegrown API docs, something that I designed, maintained, and extended as our platform grew.
Sandbox account creation for testing and lead sourcing.
Bank account opening and application review.
ACH payment origination an review.
Check deposits and review.

White Label Commercial Onboarding Application for Banks

2018-2022
I designed a commercial onboarding app for community banks that generated:
$4.5B
in deposits
75k
account applicatios
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, serving commercial customers is far more lucrative than personal account holders for banks.

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.
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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.
Desktop and mobile account application for Grasshopper Bank showing the start of an application with an email address and selection of account type.
The app broke down complex commercial account opening into simple steps that could be resumed at any time.
Desktop and mobile screenshots showing part of the account funding process allowing an applicant to chose to fund using Plaid.
Funding options, disclosures, risk tolerance, and select copy could be tailored to fit the bank's specific needs.
In most cases, applicants could have an account opened and ready to fund in less than 5 minutes.
Simple theming for logos, typeface, and colors made the app fit any bank partner's brand without risk of over-customization leading to poor end design.

Treasury Prime Website & Brand

2018-2024
I designed, built, and maintained Treasury Prime's web presence, responsible for:
90% of SQLs
were captured through treasuryprime.com
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.

The website was responsible for capturing the vast majority of our sales leads, with closed-won traffic sourced primarily from online word of mouth within the fintech and banking community.
Our updated brand and web design palette.
Redesigned brand home page highlighting platform capabilities.
Supporting brand and product illustration suite.

Network Transfers

2023
Our first year of in-platform Network Transfers resulted in:
$100M+
payment volume increase
$440k
new ARR
In early 2023 we launched a proprietary payment type—Network Transfers—a Treasury Prime payment rail that instants settles funds between banks. In the wake of the SVB failure, this made it seamless for fintechs to have relationships with multiple banks to avoid concentration risk on their deposits.
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During our API testing, we discovered that our bank partners' operational teams had difficulty understanding the novel behavior of these transfers, and as a result were unwilling to raise payment velocity limits to levels necessary for our largest customer use cases.

To give our bank partners full oversight, we extended our app to clearly show bankers the relationship between individual fintech actions and the balancing transactions under the hood. Additionally, I designed updated payloads with our data team to send payment details through our transaction monitoring integrations, and to our data warehouse product, Prime Data.
Screenshot showing a banker searching for a Network Transfer.
Bank employees can search for the transfers with payment details they can pull from their wire gateways.
Redacted screenshot of a banker's view of a "balancing wire" and all of the corresponding Network Transfer payments contained within it.
And see full details of all Network Transfers balanced with inter-bank wires.

Transaction Monitoring

2023
Built transaction monitoring with 3 integrated partners, resulting in:
+50%
upsold customers
$100k+
recurring rev share
A key part of the compliance position of fintech businesses depends on integrations with a constellation of compliance and RegTech tools to help guarantee sound banking and monitoring operations.

As PM, we launched a new standardized integration pattern to quickly and deeply integrate 3 transaction monitoring partners.

Built and launched in >3mo, more than half of customers opted in, yielding $100k+ for Treasury Prime from our partner revenue sharing agreements.
Workflow showing the flow of transaction data from Treasury Prime to partner destinations.
Workflow showing the flow of transaction data from Treasury Prime to partner destinations.

PPP Loan Application & Forgiveness

2020-2021
$2B
in loans originated
$1M+
contract revenue
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
Months later, we extended the product to handle the intake of loan forgiveness requests.
We stood up a quick and simple white label app for loan origination and forgiveness applications.
I designed the app workflow based on the Small Business Administration's API loan application requirements.

"Quick Start" Client Launch Beta

2021
In the heyday of venture-backed fintech startups (Treasury Prime's prospects), implementation time was the enemy to every new deal. But once implemented, Treasury Prime had a very sticky product.

To help reduce our clients' time from first outreach to launching a real embedded banking product, we ran an experimental project with one goal: reduce the time-to-delivery of a new customer's production API keys to less than one day. We would then test this new product with Y Combinator startups looking to build real products in time for Demo Day.

Leveraging our commercial onboarding app, we launched a workflow that allowed a fintech startup to sign an MSA, fund an operating account, and get API keys within minutes. Full banking access and additional payment permissions would then be added after successful wire funding and review by the bank.

This new 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.

Our beta period led to modest account opening and revenue increases.
1120
accounts opened
$190k
ARR
Our learnings from implementing this project were extremely valuable in reducing future sales and implementation friction. This led us to make changes including: removing tri-party contracts, default terms with limited redlines, default payment limits, and packaged pricing tiers.

However, the lackluster results of targeting very early-stage startups validated a move focus on up-market sales. 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.
Our QuickStart workflow allowed clients to sign and start using production banking APIs in just a couple hours.
A modified version of our white label commercial onboarding application served as the backbone for compliance data collection, contract signing, and account opening.
On completion, approved clients got immediate access to create API keys and fund their reserve account.
Image of a subtly Treasury Prime branded debit card falling on a table.
I created subtly branded branded card art that were pre-approved by the bank & card network so that clients could start issuing debit cards for alpha testing immediately.
The contents of a debit card mailer issued to each new client. The card is subtly Treasury Prime branded, and the mailer shows the process for activating the card via the API and using it for test transactions.
Each new client would immediate receive a physical debit card to kick-start the testing process of their new accounts.
The contents of a semi-custom debit card mailer that each Quick Start client could use to send fully branded debit cards to users in just a week.
I created several default templates so that clients could create and issue branded cards in as little as a week.