Our Investment in TreasurySpring
Following on to the great coverage elsewhere, a few personal words on why Balderton Capital chose to invest in TreasurySpring.
Ever since we met the TreasurySpring team in 2016, we have been excited about what they are building: Kevin Cook (CEO), Matthew Longhurst (COO), James Skillen (CTO), and Henry Adams’ (CPO) passion and expertise in the cash management space is unparalleled. Kevin, Matthew, and James first worked together at a multi-strategy hedge fund during the great financial crisis, where they saw first hand the multi-trillion dollar business deposit industry was in dire need of innovation. They made it their mission to find the best way to protect companies and their deposits from the next banking crisis, knowing it wasn’t a matter of “if” but rather “when”.
There was a clear opportunity for a new player to re-architect the process to unlock revenue for this massive segment. That’s exactly what TreasurySpring set out to do from day one.
In 2009, they set up an independent fixed income advisory firm called Autumn Partners, which they sold to asset manager AgFe in 2013. After working at AgFe for a few years, they founded TreasurySpring in 2017 to establish the most secure way to protect businesses’ cash and maximise returns. They also teamed up with Henry Adams who brought extensive experience from overseeing Repo Sales & Trading at RBC.
Thanks to Kevin, Matthew, James, and Henry’s creativity and deep expertise, they established a unique and easy to use cash management platform with product IP that protects clients from insolvency risks.
As we all witnessed during the financial crisis and again with the recent collapses of SVB, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse, existing cash management options come with significant risks and drawbacks.
- Cash deposits held in one or two bank accounts are largely unsecured loans with default risk.
- Money market funds carry systemic and liquidity risk in the event of large outflows.
- The repo market is expensive and only accessible to the Fortune 100 companies.
Unlike existing options, TreasurySpring’s Fixed-Term-Funds (FTFs) provide standardised, regulated, access to cash investment options, ensuring flexibility, safety and diversification for clients.
Simply put, each FTF brings together counterparties in a secure investment vehicle via the TreasurySpring platform, ensuring that TreasurySpring clients can safely and seamlessly invest their cash with the highest quality corporates, governments, and banks. For example, TreasySpring clients like Sainsbury’s, Hg, and Schroders invest in the FTF of their choice, and a high quality borrower like Barclays and Goldman Sachs contributes investment grade bonds as collateral into the fund to secure the cash investment.
Over time, we realised that both Balderton and our portfolio founders were lacking a solution to safely invest large cash balances. As a result, we joined TreasurySpring and referred Balderton portfolio companies to the platform. Everyone was extremely impressed. TreasurySpring’s cash marketplace is first-of-its-kind, and delivers the highest quality cash investing capabilities in multiple currencies to companies of all sizes in one simple platform.
We built high conviction as a firm that TreasurySpring would disrupt the cash management market.
Our thesis was further validated by the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank, making this a critical moment for businesses of all sizes and TreasurySpring. Demand for the platform is skyrocketing — with hundreds of clients signed-up including Schroders, Müller UK & Ireland, Hg, bunq, Lendable and Tide.
The stars aligned this year and Kevin, Matthew, James, and Henry were ready to bring on new investors. Given our long standing relationship, we were thrilled that they trusted us as investors to support their journey and accelerate their international expansion.
We look forward to fixing cash management for businesses together!
- Rob Moffat, Rana Yared, and Claudia Rowe
