• The need for robust, reliable payment infrastructure is complex and mission-critical for Check. With Modern Treasury, Check provides the core payroll infrastructure for platforms to build on and provide payroll to corner stores, coffee shops, restaurants, construction businesses, home-service providers and other small businesses. Check is on a mission to simplify payroll for businesses and ensure employees get paid on time and accurately.
• Since its launch, Check has processed billions of dollars in payroll volume through Modern Treasury. Onboarding was straightforward, with Check’s first bank connection live in eight weeks. Check estimates that using Modern Treasury saved six months in developer time compared to an in-house build.
• Check sees Modern Treasury as a reliable and essential partner. Modern Treasury allowed Check to have a minimum viable product at launch and continues to offer incredible value as the company scales.

Check’s mission is to make paying people simple. They enable the next generation of payroll businesses by helping them build customized, integrated payroll products that save time and reduce errors for businesses all around the country. In total, Check serves tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of employees.

Check navigates a highly complex payment environment that requires robust testing mechanisms to identify and address potential failure points. Any system errors could have severe consequences, potentially disrupting employee payments across the U.S.

Integration with legacy financial systems creates additional challenges for Check. Though ACH has been adapted for electronic transactions, it still operates on outdated, inefficient software originally designed for paper checks.

“When you have a lot of financial innovation that’s happening from different sectors, there are a lot of complex systems that arise,” says Ian Zapolsky, Head of Product at Check.

Check realized early on that partnering to build payment capabilities would allow them to move faster and focus on their core product. As Check started researching vendors, Zapolsky said Modern Treasury immediately stood out for its expertise in technology and the banking industry. “It was clear Modern Treasury had a great approach to the space — that they were technologists who had a strong grounding in our banking system.”

Modern Treasury and Check also embraced a multi-bank strategy to provide greater flexibility in adding banks as the company scaled over time. They started with Silicon Valley Bank, but after the bank collapsed in 2023, Check moved quickly to JP Morgan Chase with virtually no disruption to their systems.

“We could write a code integration once, then flip traffic from one bank to another in the future with very limited developer work,” says Zapolsky. “That was an incredibly valuable decision that’s paid off many times over in the history of Check and one of the magic features of the Modern Treasury solution.”

After using Modern Treasury for internal payroll calculations and reimbursements, Check gradually expanded its use in a phased approach, first to full payroll runs without tax payments and then to include tax payments to agencies. Since launch, Check estimates the developer team has saved at least six months of work using Modern Treasury instead of an in-house solution. Five years later, Check can attest to Modern Treasury being a reliable and essential partner.

Zapolsky says rolling out Modern Treasury was critical to creating a minimum viable product. Essentially, it was the difference between having a working product and not having one.

“Modern Treasury was a requirement to even launch in the first place,” says Zapolsky. The platform allowed Check to hire generalist developers who could understand an API and build a high-quality payment infrastructure rather than hiring a payment specialist right out of the gate.

Today, Check uses Modern Treasury's payments and recon offerings in tandem to provide timely, flexible payroll offerings to businesses and employees. Modern Treasury's payment systems create simple abstractions over complex banking systems that the team can interact with via a clean REST API, and their reconciliation tools provide more flexibility and efficiency for users when managing payments that follow non-standard flows.

With Modern Treasury as the foundation, the Check team can focus on innovative solutions that move the needle for the company. “We were able to quickly build innovative features because we didn’t have a sizable team fully managing some infrastructure with a bank — Modern Treasury is doing that for us,” said Zapolsky.

Looking to the future, Check is excited to expand how it works with Modern Treasury. The companies are exploring the role of instant payment rails, like FedNow and RTP, and how those can improve their business.

"I imagine a future where we could work with Modern Treasury to dynamically route payroll funds through a series of the largest banks,” says Zapolsky. “I think that'll make sense for us as we continue to grow in scale. Everything goes from being a huge strategic planning exercise to more of an engineering exercise when working with Modern Treasury."