New partnership helps Academy Bank offers embedded deposit services to fintechs

Written by Kansas City Business Journal, August 1, 2023

Kansas City-based Academy Bank formed a partnership with a San Francisco-based banking software provider Treasury Prime, enabling the bank to more easily offer embedded financial services to fintechs.

Treasury Prime has an award-winning Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform that grants seamless access to Academy Bank’s treasury services, enabling a fintech to rapidly launch and scale payment and deposit products. The service is backstopped by Academy Bank’s FDIC insurance and experience maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements.

“We get to stay in control of the fintech partner relationships but leverage the Treasury Prime platform that has been proven in the marketplace,” said David Robinson, director of fintech partnerships at Academy Bank. “We’re going to perform all the compliance duties, provide the necessary monitoring, settlement, payment rails and all those sorts of things. But the way we seamlessly interact with the front end of a fintech partner — the experience they provide for the customer — will be through Treasury Prime.”

Robinson spent the past seven years helping develop UMB Bank’s BaaS offerings before joining Academy Bank in December. Robinson said his goal is to shift Academy Bank toward using technology to develop new business channels, gather deposits and drive revenue.

“We’re a smaller organization, which means speed of decision making is paramount here,” Robinson said. “That’s a differentiator that Treasury Prime has already commented to us about. They have about 10 banks they’ve onboarded, and we were the quickest they were ever able to get to connectivity. It’s because we bring the doers to the table and get things done.”

A subsidiary of Dickinson Financial Corp., Academy Bank has about $2.4 billion in assets and 70 branch locations in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri, providing commercial and business banking, treasury management, mortgage services and a wide range of financial services for individuals. Academy Bank was named one of Fortune magazine’s 2023 Most Innovative Companies.

“Academy Bank's ability to service deposit customers in a highly personalized manner, combined with their unwavering commitment to innovation, forms a strong foundation for our partnership,” Jeff Nowicki, vice president of banking at Treasury Prime, said in a release.