When Treasury4’s executive team contacted Finextra to announce that it was joining the JP Morgan Payments Partner Network, we were intrigued by the ‘why.’ We wanted to know what being a part of the JPM ‘payments ecosystem’ would really mean to a fast-growing,
‘actual-experience-driven’ fintech start-up like the Spokane, WA-based treasury and finance software innovator.
Treasury4 has since its inception four years ago secured more than $23 million in funding to help power its growth.
Ed Barrie, co-founder and chief product officer for Treasury4 explained what network membership means. “They [JPMC] have a significant role as a key money centre bank, but also for us, in terms of our target customer segment - it's high growth technology
companies. JP Morgan has a big presence in what they call the innovation economy, or disruptive commerce. So, our focus overlaps and complements quite nicely with their focus. Being able to bring those solutions to mutual customers is very helpful.”
Treasury4’s joining the JPM Payments Partner programme, Barrie said, is important in several ways, to both the company and its customers. Mostly, it’s about making managing treasury activities easier for all parties. “[Through the JPM network] we’re facilitating
connectivity and data integration on behalf of a mutual customer who already has either bank accounts, DDA accounts, or investment other types of accounts with JPM. Typically, most of the customers that we work with are multi-bank, so they work not only with
JP Morgan, but with other institutions.”
Home turf has been good base for innovative software startup’s growth
The capital of the ‘Inland Northwest’ - across the Cascade Mountains and on the other side of Washington State from Seattle - Spokane is a growing tech hub for the region. But just because they’re on familiar ground, that doesn’t mean Barrie and his colleagues
are sitting in their offices much. Frequent travel, conferences, and virtual meetings - to talk to clients and new and prospective customers about Treasury4’s suite of treasury and finance solutions - have taken Barry and other Treasury4 leaders all over the
country.
How have those business and product rollout efforts progressed? Barrie responded enthusiastically: “I'd say we're progressing quite well. We are continuing to advance [on the] product development front, and we're adding new features and functionality in
our Entity4 Module, our Cash4 module, and more announcements are coming.” The company’s name reflects its offering of these two “built from the ground up” legal entity management and cash flow management applications, along with its other specialised payments
and liquidity module.
Barrie has lots of experience with banking software systems, and multi-bank scenarios as well. “That’s why you typically start having a treasury management system,” he explains, “because you're multi-bank. You have to communicate with all of them, manage
these different workflows. So, a single bank portal isn't necessarily going to meet all of your needs, although many of the online portals, whether it's [those from] JP Morgan, HSBC, Bank of America, are all fantastic portals, but they're tailored primarily
for [banking] exclusively, or with all your activities at that institution.”
Nimble solutions, borne of “looking for a better way” to manage, power the company’s progress
The JP Morgan arrangement opens doors for Treasury4 and its customers, much as other payments network memberships such as the one they announced with US Bank earlier this summer, help the company increase its utility value. It focuses on building easier,
API-led integrations that Barrie says they can accomplish dramatically faster than through traditional banking channels – or via many of the company’s legacy competitors.
Building these quicker, simpler connections, he emphasises, helps Treasury4 project the company’s own core strengths as a supplier of truly practical, useful solutions. Their software addressing critical treasury functions has been carefully conceived, designed,
and tested by treasury and finance experts – themselves and their clients. It fills the “holes” that Barrie and his colleagues spent years in the corporate world looking to fill in their own departments, wondering why they couldn’t find the sophisticated data
and information management tools they really wished they had in the existing software and systems marketplace.
Cloud-based data and business intelligence platforms enhance client analysis options
The major-bank simplified connectivity announcements – with more on the way – aren’t the only big news lately for Treasury4, says Barrie. “I think one of the biggest things that we've done this year is build out a new reporting platform, built on the Snowflake
Cloud Data Warehouse. We're using a new BI (business intelligence) data visualisation platform called Sigma Computing.” This, Barrie emphasised, has brought huge advantages for the software firm’s capabilities and those of its clients. “We take all the data
that goes into Treasury4 and make it available in Snowflake, and then we build customer facing dashboards and analytics in Sigma. But the great thing about this capability is all the data that we have available for customers in the platform.”
Barrie, putting his finance manager’s hat on, gets very excited about what this means to people in such roles. “They can build their own dashboards and analytics in the application so they're not ‘wedded’ to historical, ‘canned’ reports. They can take what
we've built and iterate off of them. They can also build their own analytics from scratch, and that's a real differentiator for us from other legacy tools. It's really empowering users with data.”
This flexible data analysis functionality gets even more interesting, Barrie explains, because it allows Treasury4’s customers to import data from other, “adjacent” systems to supplement their “standard” reporting. This could be from merchant processing,
investment accounting, or other applications. “They're bringing that data that they're extracting from those systems into our reporting platform, so now they can have a much more holistic view of all their treasury activity, their cash flows, their investments,
a much more expansive view. And that's really been a differentiator for us.”