KeyBank has partnered with software-as-a-service provider Treasury Prime to offer enhanced embedded banking solutions to its clients, leveraging the fintech’s technology in an effort to extend the lender’s reach, the bank said Thursday.
The partnership, initiated after a years-long casual relationship, intends to address clients’ pain points through faster revenue generation and simpler technical uplifts for clients with complex structures, Bennie Pennington, head of embedded banking product and strategy for KeyBank, told Banking Dive.
“Treasury Prime is a proven leader in financial services technology who has access to a certain set of clients that have unique needs that we partner well together in serving for,” Pennington said. “They are a high-quality service provider that has experience in the market, and that can help us extend the reach of some of our newer solutions and embedded banking.”
Treasury Prime’s pre-built integration model can help to reduce the time spent on activation and implementation, he said.
The roughly $190 billion-asset KeyBank is more focused on customer acquisition than retention, Pennington stressed.
The partnership targets fintechs, embedded banking clients, and corporate and institutional clients who might need a secondary bank partner but do not have the technical build on that front, said Jeff Nowicki, chief banking officer at Treasury Prime.
Clients can turn to KeyBank and Treasury Prime’s network and graduate to a larger, more stable balance-sheet bank, without abandoning their first bank partner, Nowicki said.
“We're building a standardization across our [application programming interfaces], and no matter what bank that client is interacting with, the technical build is the same. And I think that's what the benefits Treasury Prime is bringing to the table,” Nowicki said.
KeyBank is ensuring clients know about available options if they can't immediately undertake a full API integration, including relationships with service providers who can accelerate implementation and reduce technical effort, Pennington noted.
Nowicki clarified that Treasury Prime’s real-time data is synced into KeyBank’s system. Thus, clients can review transactions and see trends in real time, which is crucial for KeyBank and other lenders within the fintech’s network.
KeyBank has a “long roadmap” of solutions and enhancements the lender wants to add, Pennington said.
“I see the partnership evolving over time into us solving varieties and new types of fintech go-to-market models that we haven't even really contemplated or dug deep underneath yet,” Pennington said.
The collaboration aligns with KeyBank’s strategy of partnering with fintechs like Qolo and AvidXchange to expand into new markets and client segments, Pennington said. As the lender continues to innovate and cater to the growing needs of its clients, it realized it could not solve every money movement in-house with its original go-to-market model. Clients had some additional requirements that KeyBank couldn’t serve off the shelf with its ready-made integration model.
Pennington highlighted KeyBank’s thorough understanding of varying compliance regulations across states and industry verticals, stressing that regulatory compliance is the basis of the product development process rather than an afterthought.
“Partnering with fintechs has been part of KeyBank strategy for a number of years,” Pennington said. “There are software companies like Treasury Prime that are innovative in specific areas or have very specific use cases and client types that they serve better than we can. So, having fintech software providers that we go to market with in certain segments has always been part of our strategy. What we're seeing is that strategy continues to pay off, and this is a natural evolution of it that we want to continue writing a trend.”
