Silicon Valley Bank acquired the assets and team of banking API startup Standard Treasury, the bank announced today.
Can we say APIs in banking have finally arrived?
In a blogpost this morning, Standard Treasury co-founder Zac Townsend described his company’s two-year journey from its beginnings as a Y-Combinator-backed startup, building APIs to connect modern services to antiquated banking cores:
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.
Silicon Valley Bank indicated that transaction details would not be disclosed. Townsend and Dan Kimerling, the startup’s co-founders, will join the bank’s IT department at the director level and will work on building out the bank’s API offerings, naturally. Standard Treasury is a graduate of the SVB and MasterCard accelerator called Commerce.Innovated.
“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, Silicon Valley Bank’s COO. “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.”
An API survey conducted in April by Bank Innovation and the Berlin-based Open Bank Project revealed that 26% of banks surveyed already had APIs built or underway, while 38% planned to build one in the next year. Only 18% had no plans, and 19% said, “Maybe.”