Why We're Building Modern Treasury

With the introduction of the Modern Treasury blog, we wanted to share our original public post about the company. Here it is, with a few additional photos from our earliest days.

We’re excited to introduce Modern Treasury, a startup that is simplifying and modernizing payments for businesses. We’ve spent the summer building our product as part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 batch, and today we’re excited to share it with the world.

Sam, Matt, and I met at LendingHome, where we built a mortgage marketplace that funds loans, collects monthly payments, initiates investor deposits, and handles many other transfers. These money movements happen via ACH, wire, and check. Done once, a wire can be a slight hassle. Done thousands of times a day, it is a major hassle where mistakes can cost millions and lack of automation can bring a high growth company to a standstill.‍

All businesses quickly discover that automating payments only solves part of the problem. Most transactions are so non-specific, that it is almost impossible to figure out what they were for. Just imagine looking at a bank statement and trying to piece together its financial history. For a company that is processing thousands of transactions a day, this lack of specificity in its own accounts becomes an accounting nightmare, making it extremely difficult to reconcile payments and close the books.

Finance professionals commonly face this predicament as they try to make sense of a company’s flow of money. Yet somewhere in the application database, the company has all the context necessary to understand these flows. Perhaps a client requested a deposit or a withdrawal, or maybe rent was being collected because it was the 1st of the month, or an insurance claim was authorized. In all cases, the app’s code knew what it was doing and why, but there isn’t an easy way for the finance team to connect these two data silos.

Since more and more payments start with software, we believe software should not just initiate, but also monitor and reconcile this payment activity automatically.

Every day half a million wires and over 60 million ACH payments are sent in the US. And every day, millions of finance and accounting professionals in the US try to make sense of those payments, asking what they were, why they happened, and how to book them.

Modern Treasury enables its clients to marry bank statements with the company’s business logic to provide an enriched history of the company’s financial transactions. This view will empower the company’s finance teams to focus on solving the mission-critical problems of the business and not piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of bank transactions by hand. Modern Treasury will help answer those questions faster and with more confidence.

Thank you to our earliest supporters.

At Modern Treasury, we’re excited about the payment operations platform we’re building for businesses. If our mission resonates with you, please reach out to sales@moderntreasury.com, because we would love to hear from you.