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
From the earliest days of Treasury Prime, I researched, designed, and scoped our frontend applications in close partnership with our bank partners.

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.
5k
SQLs generated
1500
MAUs
15+
Bank partners
100+
Fintechs implemented
When I left Treasury Prime in Q2'24, we were in the process of launching a new consolidated app for banks and fintech clients with a full UI re-design and new backend infrastructure.
Sandbox account creation for testing and lead sourcing.
Bank account opening and application review.
ACH payment origination an review.
Check deposits and review.

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.
Our updated brand and web design palette.
Redesigned brand home page highlighting platform capabilities.
Supporting brand and product illustration suite.

White Label Commercial Onboarding Application for Banks

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, 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.

We launched with 3 bank partners, facilitating:
$4.5B
in deposits
75k
account applicatios
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.
The app broke down complex commercial account opening into simple steps that could be resumed at any time.
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.

"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.

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.
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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
Create and track instant inter-bank Network Transfer payments.
With bank ability to search and view the underlying wires that balance aggregate funds movement.
And visibility into the aggregated transfers contributing to net settlement.

Transaction Monitoring

2023
A key part of the compliance position of Treasury Prime and its fintech clients depends on integrations with a constellation of compliance and RegTech tools to help guarantee sound banking and monitoring operations. Treasury Prime maintains some direct integrations to bolster platform buy-in and a source of revenue share.

Prior to my leading our data team at Treasury Prime, each of our integrations with transaction monitoring partners was bespoke, and laborious to build. As part of my work as PM, we launched a new standardized integration pattern to use with all present and future partners.

This not only streamlined our existing data pipeline, allowing our analytics team to be more responsive to change requests, but also allowed for a step change in how quickly we could integrate with new product partners.

This reduction in cost and complexity resulted in:
3 new
partner integration
+50%
customer adoption
$100k+
ARR from revenue share
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
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.
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.