Chris Dean Of Treasury Prime On The Future of Money and Banking

An Interview With David Liu

Perseverance. Don’t quit. You can change your mind, but everything worth doing has hard parts. You just have to grind through them.

The way we bank has changed dramatically over the last decade. It was not too long ago when you had to wait in line in a bank to deposit money. Today things are totally different. You can do your banking without ever walking into a bank. In addition, the whole concept of money has changed. In the recent past, money usually meant bills and coins. But today, the concept of money has expanded to include digital currency and NFTs. What other innovations should we expect to see in banking in the short and medium term?

To address this, we are talking to leaders in the banking, finance, and fintech worlds, to discuss the future of banking and money over the next few years. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Dean, CEO at Treasury Prime.

As CEO and Co-Founder of Treasury Prime, Chris Dean is responsible for all aspects of Treasury Prime’s strategy, execution, and operations. Prior to launching Treasury Prime, he served as CTO of “API first” company Standard Treasury. When the startup was acquired by Silicon Valley Bank, he took on the role of CTO of API banking for SVB. Earlier in his career, Chris founded or co-founded software companies including Merced Systems (enterprise software), Kyluka (a consulting firm), and Benefitter (ACA-based health plan.) Chris started his career as technical staff in the Machine Learning Systems Group of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He studied physics at California Institute of Technology.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started in this industry?

I have been involved in the technology and finance industries for around 25 years. In that time, I have often been intrigued by not only how banking works but also how it can be improved. Technological advances have raised the bar for traditional customer-facing institutions, so I was tracking innovations in enterprise-level software and banking very closely.

After founding (and selling) a couple of companies, I was thinking about retiring. But before I could catch my breath, my friend Dan Kimerling convinced me in 2014 to be CTO of his nine-month-old startup.

This was Standard Treasury, an “API First ‘’ banking software startup that was designed to be used by the top 100 US banks to manage fintech clients. Within a year, this startup got purchased by Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). That led to me running the Fintech group at SVB and realizing that the U.S. banking infrastructure as a whole was struggling to both evolve and digitize.

From my view inside a bank, I could see that the people trying to fix the infrastructure problem would all fail. The rent-a-charter banking startups would never reach the scale they needed, and the regulators would never innovate enough to bring our banking system on par with the rest of the world. Which was a major problem.

That’s when we had tech’s notorious “Aha!” moment. With this light bulb over our heads, Jim Brusstar and I left SVB and co-founded Treasury Prime based on a solution-based strategy. This desire to connect two sides of the same coin — visionary fintechs and innovative banks — has not changed in the years since founding.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Early in my career, I was VP of Engineering, and our parent company had a downturn, and as part of that downturn, we were forced to do a layoff. I laid off 30% of my team, and it was terrible. My GM at the time taught me a great lesson: “These were good and trusted people yesterday, and they are the same people today.”The layoff was traumatic, but in the end, we weathered the transition because we had such great people still on board. Over the next year, we recovered and went on to have a successful exit entirely because we had been so careful about hiring and training over the years.

Hiring the right people is the most overwhelmingly important thing you can do for a startup to guarantee success.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Stand on the shoulders of giants.”

So much of my life has been built on top of other people’s great work. For years, I ran high-powered software engineering groups and developed my own approach and taxonomy. But it wasn’t until my dear friend Rachel Gollub (a world-class engineer who is also an expert in military history) told me that what I was doing was just replicating military strategist John Boyd’s theories. She suggested that I read up on maneuver warfare because my approach was not that different than the tactics outlined in the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Manual. Extending our software development process with that rigorous approach made us even more productive and effective.

Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

The network effect of Treasury Prime is just taking off. The banks are seeing more fintechs partnering with them, and the quality of the banks in our network is bringing many more fintechs than we could have predicted. The fintechs are starting to consume services across multiple banks, which is fantastic for everyone.

How do you think this might change the world?

Banking in the US has struggled for decades to keep up with the innovation we see in the rest of the world. The Treasury Prime platform finally allows banks to reach the clients they have always wanted to reach. We haven’t seen transformation on this scale before, and it will benefit a wide customer base from the unbanked to the very wealthy.

What most excites you about the banking or payments industry as it is today? Can you explain what you mean?

Digital first has essentially become digital only. We all know that software has been eating the world for more than a decade, but the digital transformation that banks needed has been somewhat glacial — even more so when you look at how retail and (to some extent) the logistics sector took notice of what the connected society demanded as table stakes.

On the flip side, effective digital transformation and providing what customers want is a marathon and not a sprint. If we think about the perception of a bank in 2012 — or even the concept of money itself — then it becomes increasingly clear that the banking and financial services industry is making significant gains in this world of digitized products, services and customer offerings.

Banks have been part of our lives for over 100 years, so the fact that decision makers seem keen to embrace innovation through fintech partnerships and next-generation technologies — AI, predictive analytics, APIs, contactless payment and biometrics, to name but a few — makes me confident that they are on the right digital path and conscious of their need for digital maturity.

That is tremendously exciting, not because they had to become players in the digital game, but that they are willing to invest in what is obviously a much bigger picture. The bank of the future is going to be a completely different animal than what we have come to expect from these institutions, and it is access to next-gen technology that will drive banks forward.

What most concerns you about the banking or payments industry as it is today? What would you suggest needs to be done to address that?

What continues to concern me is that established banks (and other financial services providers) have been playing catch-up in terms of both customer experience and the digital products they can offer.

Banking has maintained its own status quo for years, and potentially disruptive technology has often been viewed with an abundance of caution by decision makers and business leaders.

Digitalization and the increased acceptance of mobile or online banking has gone some way to addressing the needs of what we can call digitally-savvy customers (Millennials and Gen Z, for example) but the older generations are still more likely to prefer a physical banking experience over a virtual one. The caveat is that banks and financial institutions have been either closing brick-and-mortar locations or consolidating them into what could loosely be called a hybrid — one where customers can either bank in the traditional sense or engage with digital products or services in a bank-branded location.

The question, in my opinion, is not how do we address this apparent disconnect, but what are the tools that banks can use to bridge what is becoming a digital gap between expectation and actual experience?

The connected society demands frictionless or seamless interactions and that require banks to have all the right tools in place at the right time to be truly successful. In addition, the number of financial services options available to the average person has grown at an incredible rate and while people are often reluctant to change their bank, they also know that there are other providers — a recent survey by Nielsen said that less than 50 percent of U.S. bank customers consider their bank to be the primary financial services provider, for instance.

How would you articulate how the concept of money has changed in recent times? Is it really a change? How is it still the same? Can you explain what you mean?

Money (as a concept) must, according to economists, be fungible, durable, divisible, portable, acceptable, uniform and limited in supply.

Simply put, the function of money is to be a financial instrument in an economic system. In order to assess if the concept of money has changed in the last, say, decade, we must factor in the two procedures that create money — legal tender (physical banknotes and coins, created by the central bank of a country) and bank money (created by private banks and used for the dispersion of defined or agreed financial transactions).

In our modern and increasingly digital society, bank money is essentially electronic.

Most people never see the actual money that is attached to their checking or savings accounts, relying on a digital representation that banks control on their behalf. But the concept of money hasn’t changed at all, it is still a financial instrument that powers the economic system itself.

What has changed is how we access the money.

Physical cash has — by and large — become an anachronism in the connected society. ATMs are still a fixture in banking locations, but the increased use of the internet and the mobile revolution provided banks and other financial services providers with the platform to give its customers 24/7 access to digital money. The app economy has also played its part, with embedded banking and other forms of finance allowing banks to engage with their customers in a non-traditional way. Banks are awesome at banking, that is why they still have relevance … it’s just that the concept of money has evolved to fit customer demands and requirements.

Physical representations of money exist, they just come in the form of credit or debit cards. Digital wallets are still evolving, but being able to use your smartphone to pay for a coffee is exactly the sort of frictionless experience that a modern bank customer wants to have. And we should never forget that digital banking is already a ubiquitous part of the connected society — we have the capacity to bank or access financial services when we want to, another reason why the relationship between fintech and banks is a vital (and necessary) part of the wider financial services ecosystem.

Based on your vantage point as an insider in the finance industry, what innovations should we expect to see in banking in the short and medium term? How has the pandemic changed the way banks interact and engage with their customers?

The pandemic will likely be cited as a catalyst for change across a number of industry verticals, but the platform for that change was in place before 2020. Customers were already interacting with their banks in different (and mainly digital) ways, the pandemic — which remains an ongoing black swan event — simply accelerated the development of engagement portals that allowed people to transact their financial business in a way that didn’t involve physical interaction.

We have already talked about how digital first morphed into digital only, and there is an argument that COVID-19 persuaded banks to increase investment into digital tools and fintech partnerships.

Granted, it changed the rulebook in terms of how effective customer engagement could benefit from seamless interactions in a virtual ecosystem, but the goalposts for how that would be achieved had been moving long before the global health crisis forced banks and their customers into an extended digital or online relationship.

The key point to remember is that, for a significant number of people, this seemed to happen overnight. This scenario becomes even more relevant when you take into account the established and traditional ways of engagement that had been the cornerstone of banking practices for decades.

What the pandemic did do, however, was encourage banks to look at how, why, and where they were engaging. In other words, they become more aware of potential roadblocks and a requirement for a seamless customer experience that mirrored how the connected society engaged with, say, ecommerce, social media or lifestyle choices.

The important point to make is that the pandemic shifted the needle for banks firmly in the direction of digitization and fintech. That is both a blessing and a curse, as banks will now have less time to overcome any barriers that arise from this new normal. Digital transformation is all about taking advantage of the tools and solutions available, and this is a litmus test that banks must pass. Once the societal challenges generated by the pandemic have receded into the distance, then we will know who followed the right path to digital maturity.

In your particular experience, how has the pandemic changed the way you interact with, and engage your customers?

Very similar to pre-pandemic. We’re an API-first software company, so our interactions with fintechs are very much like it has always been: email, slack, zoom, etc.

The giant change is the banks! We used to fly out to have dinner and give an in-person pitch to the banks. Now we do that all remotely.

In my work in the telecom space, I’m very interested in the importance of user experience. How much of your interactions have moved to digital such as chatbots, encrypted messaging apps, phone, or video calls? How has this shift impacted the user and customer experience? What challenges do these apps present when used as a customer engagement tool?

We do it now like we have done it since the company started. There are many video calls, email tickets, and encrypted chat for very sensitive data. We share Slack channels with our busiest clients. Not much has changed.

If you could design the perfect communication feature or system to help your business, what would it be?

A tool that bridged the gap between a task list and a conversation would be useful. Email is mainly used to insert items into my task list. Slack, email, etc. are all really just to-do lists.

What are your “5 Things you need to create a highly successful career in the modern finance, banking and fintech industries?

Treasury Prime is here to reimagine the entire US banking system. This is an incredibly ambitious goal to make ourpart of the world better. . A career is a means to an end. The wealth is there to fund the next project to move towards the bigger goal.

1. Character. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to develop the discipline to say no and be incredibly patient until the right opportunity arises. Be patient until the time is right, then be very aggressive when the opportunity comes. By having your own set of principles and sense of worth, you can make the hard decisions. Because no one else will make the decisions for you.
2. Perseverance. Don’t quit. You can change your mind, but everything worth doing has hard parts. You just have to grind through them.
3. Honesty. Be clearheaded and recognize the actual truth in front of you. Be honest with yourself. The mere act of not doing something stupid is incredibly valuable, and the easiest way to do that is to see the world as it is.
4. Ability. To succeed in a complex and chaotic world, you need to move rapidly. The only way to apply focus and get the results you want is to be great in your field. If you can’t do that, find a new field.
5. Commitment. If you have an idea or goal — in my case a startup — take it seriously. Put your whole self into it.

If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Make banking accessible to everyone, everywhere. Treasury Prime was created for this exact reason and based on my direct experience growing up with poor access to banking services.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The best place to reach me is through LinkedIn or via my blog, Dean’s List.

Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.