Treasury Prime

Treasury Prime

Treasury Prime was co-founded by CEO Chris Dean, the former CTO of API Banking at Silicon Valley Bank, following SVB's acquisition of his earlier startup Standard Treasury. The firm builds and maintains a software layer that lets chartered banks offer banking-as-a-service to fintech companies without ceding control of their compliance or customer relationships. Dean's earlier ventures include enterprise software firm Merced Systems and health-plan platform Benefitter; he began his career in the Machine Learning Systems Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. General Counsel Sheetal Parikh joined from Morgan Stanley's Wealth Management group and a venture-backed startup, bringing nearly two decades of financial-services legal practice to the executive team. The platform functions as a two-sided network: banks gain a REST API integrated with their core systems to onboard fintech partners, while fintechs access a marketplace of over 20 bank and product partners for services including KYC, compliance monitoring, instant account funding, and payment rails. Treasury Prime does not intermediate the bank-fintech relationship — each bank retains direct account control and regulatory oversight, a structural departure from middleware BaaS providers that bundle sponsor-bank access with program management. The firm's revenue leadership, under Travis Champion, targets banks seeking low-cost deposit growth and fintechs building digital-native financial products across payments, lending, and deposit accounts. Treasury Prime's leadership roster mixes technical, legal, and operational veterans: VP of Engineering Carlos Armas previously led DevOps at OpenTable and network-services teams in Cuba's biotech sector; Controller Lauryn Moore built financial infrastructure at PlushCare and Accolade; VP of People Brandi Bloodworth scaled Azlo from 70 to over 150 employees and opened its Mexico City office. Travis Champion joined in 2024 following Minna Technologies' acquisition by Mastercard, where he drove North American cardholder reach past 100 million. The firm's investor base includes backers from the fintech and venture ecosystem, though specific funders and funding rounds have not been publicly detailed. Treasury Prime's architecture makes the bank itself the direct program manager — a compliance posture that aligns with heightened regulatory scrutiny of intermediary BaaS models. By embedding its API inside each bank's own systems rather than operating a centralized sponsor-bank layer, the firm allows banks to choose their fintech partners and manage risk using their own compliance staff, a governance structure that differentiates it from platform-model competitors where the technology provider also manages the banking relationship.