Silicon Valley Bank has hired the team from startup company Standard Treasury to jump start its efforts to build an API-based banking platform.
Standard Treasury was a Y Combinator-backed company and a graduate of the SVB and MasterCard accelerator, Commerce.Innovated.
Led by Daniel Kimerling and Zachary Townsend, the former Standard Treasury team joined Silicon Valley Bank's information technology unit this week, along with certain unspecified assets. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The move follows a failed initiative by the two-year old startup to build its own bank. "Earlier this year, primarily because of concerns around regulatory and geographic risks, we were unable to raise a Series A funding round against that goal," says Townsend. "With that door closed, we decided the next best thing was to closely align ourselves with one bank, in order to build a richer, more full featured, set of API based services for customers."
Bruce Wallace, chief operations officer, Silicon Valley Bank says SVB is planning to release new API banking services over the coming months that are currently in development by the Standard Treasury team.
"We view API banking services as a natural progression in how our tech-savvy clients want to work with their banking partners and service providers," he says. "API banking services are a key part of our product delivery and service platform strategy."