Where Modern Treasury Fits

It depends on what you're moving. Stripe Connect and Adyen are card-first processors. Unit and Stripe Treasury are banking-as-a-service providers that issue accounts to your end users. Increase is a single chartered bank behind an API. Airwallex is built for cross-border and FX. Modern Treasury is a payment service provider for platforms moving money over bank rails: ACH, RTP, FedNow, wire, push-to-card, checks, and stablecoins, with a real-time ledger underneath.

Stripe has two products that platforms weigh against Modern Treasury. Stripe Connect splits card revenue between a platform and its sellers. Stripe Treasury embeds bank accounts inside the Stripe ecosystem. Both are built around Stripe's own banking relationships. Modern Treasury runs on bank rails directly, and you can use our bank partners or bring your own.

Five things decide most evaluations: which rails the provider supports natively rather than through an abstraction, whether the ledger is real-time and auditable, where the compliance boundary sits between the provider, its partner banks, and your team, whether you can bring your own bank, and what the pricing does as volume grows.

Building bank connectivity, a ledger, and a compliance program in house takes most teams 6–18 months and 4–8 engineers, and the maintenance cost never ends. Buying makes sense when payment operations are not the product. Building makes sense when the payment flow itself is the differentiator and no provider models it.

Neither. Modern Treasury is an integrated payment service provider. It owns the bank relationships, the compliance program, the ledger, and reconciliation. An orchestration layer routes transactions to other providers and leaves those responsibilities with you.