The future of corporate treasury management with Atomic, Treasury Prime and Meow

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the ripple it caused across the banking sector has reminded people about the need for sound treasury management and financial hygiene. Overnight, people have started to understand the importance of having multiple bank accounts and spreading exposure across a number of institutions. We summarized key actionable insights here.

Over the past five years, there's been an explosion of consumer-facing financial products, but that has not happened yet for commercial banking. Recent events have created a structural change in the market that will fuel greater adoption of fintech banking, whereby the banking experience is given to you through a fintech that has a more digitally accessible platform, versus through a bank that is not as digitally accessible.

While we never hope for a crisis, they can be helpful by revealing deeper truths about the financial system. Financial services require 100 percent reliability – after all, it’s always other people’s money. Executives must balance risk and yield through the cycle, and fintech, in particular, will only thrive with fanatical dedication to customers.

At QED, we’re fortunate that a trio of our portfolio companies – Treasury Prime, Atomic Invest and Meow – are finding that these deeper truths are creating massive tailwinds for growth. Furthermore, by partnering, they’ve unlocked step function growth and innovation.  

Treasury Prime was founded with the belief that fintechs would not only need a modern interface into old-school banking through APIs, but also that any fintech at scale would need multiple bank partners to offer a full suite of products and avoid single points of failure. Years in the making, Treasury Prime launched its OneKey product just days after the SVB collapse. OneKey is a breakthrough product that allows fintechs to work with multiple banks through a single tech stack – even enabling banks to serve only the portion of the fintech's business that they feel comfortable with, while another bank can serve a different aspect.

Atomic Invest believes that businesses of all sizes should afford the same level of sophistication in treasury management as prominent Fortune 500 companies. To this end, Atomic has built investment infrastructure that empowers B2B financial service providers worldwide to deliver state-of-the-art treasury management solutions to their clients. This allows these providers to augment their services with treasury management capabilities, without the regulatory, investment and operational overhead. Atomic’s offerings encompass access to U.S. Treasuries, Money Market funds, enhanced FDIC-insured sweeps and automated laddering strategies to any business in the world.

Meow enables companies to ensure they have the right type of cash, in the right account, at the right time. Built on Treasury Prime’s banking-as-a-service offering, Meow offers businesses of any scale the opportunity to hold cash at multiple banks. Moreover, Meow has partnered with Atomic Invest to build the simplest way for any company to hold their reserve cash in the U.S. Treasuries. Their point and click interface makes treasury management as easy as ordering food for delivery.  

At QED we’ve always invested with the belief that successful startups are driven by relentless customer obsession. During the crisis at SVB, we were reminded just how painful, high friction and stressful cash management can be for companies of all sizes. At the same time, consumer financial products are a generation ahead in terms of ease of use – even in our own portfolio (Nubank, Albert, Current, ClearScore, Jupiter, Coru).

This is changing. While there have been groundbreaking point solutions for CFOs, (for example, with working capital there is Capchase for SaaS or Wayflyer and Fairplay for eCommerce) the connective tissue between these solutions is still typically Excel. Don’t get us wrong - we love Excel, but we know we can do better.

The partnerships between Meow, Treasury Prime and Atomic are exemplary of what is possible when great teams work together. Moreover, we know that markets for business banking are even bigger and more fragmented than consumer markets, so we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible.

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Amias Gerety and Camila Key Saruhashi contributed to this article.