Silicon Valley Bank Buys Standard Treasury to Build the Future of API Banking Services

Silicon Valley Bank, the bank of the world’s most innovative companies, announced it had acquired the assets and team from startup company Standard Treasury to help accelerate the development of its banking services APIs that will enable easier collaboration, product development, and integration with SVB’s clients.

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The Standard Treasury team joined Silicon Valley Bank’s information technology team this week to support SVB’s expanding digital banking platform. Silicon Valley Bank also acquired certain assets of Standard Treasury. Details regarding the transaction were not kept confidential.

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Zachary Townsend, Co-Founder of Standard Treasury, said in the blog, "Last year we decided that the best way to bring the Standard Treasury vision to fruition was to build our own bank. That’s a big dream. Earlier this year, primarily because of concerns around regulatory and geographic risks, we were unable to raise a Series A funding round against that goal. With that door closed, we decided the next best thing was to closely align ourselves with one bank in order to build a richer, more full-featured set of API-based services for customers. The more we learned about SVB, the more we believe this partnership will be a faster, better way to create the impact that we sought to create."

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"We view API banking services as a natural progression in how our tech-savvy clients want to work with their banking partners and service providers," said Bruce Wallace, Chief Operations Officer, Silicon Valley Bank, in the press release. "API banking services are a key part of our product delivery and service platform strategy. The Standard Treasury team’s vision for the future of API banking services aligned perfectly with our vision, so it’s exciting that we are now joining forces to deliver that vision to the market.”

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“Our goal at Standard Treasury was to simplify banking technology for clients and developers, and we’re looking forward to pursuing that goal at Silicon Valley Bank," said Daniel Kimerling, Co-founder of Standard Treasury, Founder of Giftly and Director at Silicon Valley Bank, in the press release.

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Over the coming months, SVB is planning to release new banking services APIs that are currently in development by the Standard Treasury team.

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“The Standard Treasury team is loaded with great technical talent,” said Seth Polansky, Head of Global Digital Banking for Silicon Valley Bank in the press release. “They will help us expedite our plans to build out our API platform and deliver a world-class developer experience that takes the ‘bank speak’ out of bank integrations.”

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Standard Treasury was a Y Combinator-backed company and a graduate of the SVB and Mastercard accelerator Commerce.Innovated.

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“Building the future of banking technology is why we started Standard Treasury, and we’re happy to be joining an organization that shares those values as clearly as Silicon Valley Bank,” said Zac Townsend, Co-founder of Standard Treasury, former Senior Technology Policy Advisor to Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker and current Director at Silicon Valley Bank, in the press release.

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As FinTech startups continue to disrupt traditional financial services, banks are waking up to the fact that offering an Open API—where developers can latch on and create very specific customized app solutions—is the way in the future to engage and retain their customers. Banks and other financial institutions are sharing codes through application programming interfaces of software gateways that allow applications to work together. APIs are a bank’s tool for survival and relevance in a smartphone-first world. So making it open to outsiders is pretty much like inviting the competition to come in and read the insider’s notes.

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