• C2FO went live with Modern Treasury in just three months.
• As of 2023, C2FO has processed $50m in aggregate card volume via Modern Treasury.
• Using Modern Treasury, C2FO gained greater visibility and revenue potential by stepping into the flow of funds.

For growing companies, accessing capital is complex. C2FO enables business suppliers, customers, and partners to access and leverage funds quickly, efficiently, and reliably. The company delivers on its mission by offering a technology-driven financing marketplace for suppliers and borrowers of growth capital—from small companies to the Fortune 100.

The C2FO model is innovative for facilitating dynamic discounting: C2FO intermediates the exchange of capital between two businesses—typically suppliers and buyers—without the need for underwriting or extending traditional credit.

C2FO facilitates a direct relationship between, “a supplier who has a set of receivables that are owned by a buyer and C2FO through the platform”, VP of Growth Marketing Vishnu Sundaram shares. C2FO then allows invoice payments to be accelerated, generating precious capital for suppliers. Initially, C2FO instructed the movement of funds but did not sit in the flow of funds or directly intermediate transactions between suppliers and customers.

Over time it became clear that greater control over money movement would open opportunities for C2FO. They were also looking to launch a card program. Scaling their model to include cards required significant investment in automated payment operations—and Modern Treasury was the right solution.

C2FO began considering a card program in late 2021 with two primary objectives. First, the company wanted to offer customers modern, flexible features—such as the ability to set rebates for invoices that are paid early—ensuring fast turnaround times on funds without additional business costs. Second, for C2FO, the program had to be scalable, reliable, and grow the company's bottom line.

Sundaram puts the economic rationale for C2FO into context. “Card transactions and the revenue we get from them have the potential to be higher than our core product’s revenue. So the more spend we capture, the greater revenue impact cards have for us,” he says.

“A lot of our customers don't participate or take advantage of our core product because of the cost associated with getting paid early. Now, with the card program, there's no cost associated with funding a card and spending on the card.”

Vishnu Sundaram, VP of Growth Marketing at C2FO

Offering a card program meant that C2FO would have to enter the flow of funds.

"We needed to insert ourselves into the payment flow. That's why we started setting up ways to pull money from our suppliers’ bank accounts into the C2FO ecosystem," Sundaram says.

“But we weren’t experts in payment flow. The nuances of syncing with bank systems, understanding the files and formats, and anticipating the errors and how to display them in a format that was easy to understand and digest—that’s not something we could do.”

In seeking a partner to help the company enter the flow of funds, C2FO discovered Modern Treasury. As a result, C2FO can now manage the instructions associated with moving money between businesses, funding and defunding cards, and automating payments.

Modern Treasury not only helped C2FO avoid the cost and overhead associated with developing, building, and maintaining this new payments infrastructure, but it also dramatically sped up and simplified the launch of the company’s card program.

The entire launch took three months from start to end. As C2FO Staff Engineer Pratik Pandit recalls, Modern Treasury’s APIs dramatically improved productivity and efficiency for his team.

Pandit says, “We work with a bunch of vendors and Modern Treasury's APIs are the most standardized we’ve encountered. The integration was great and saved a lot of time—at least a couple of weeks’ worth of work!”

The team at C2FO greatly appreciated the quality of Modern Treasury’s documentation. “There was no ambiguity at my end about how things work and what to expect as a developer,” Pandit says.

According to Pandit, Modern Treasury sets a new standard for documentation.

“A while back, we were discussing how to build an API, and Modern Treasury’s API is actually the example that I gave. I said, ‘This is the level of documentation we should strive for, this is where we need to be.’ So that's how good the documentation is at Modern Treasury, it’s what I would consider the benchmark.”

Pratik Pandit, Staff Engineer at C2FO

They also found Modern Treasury’s educational content essential. “I remember at the beginning of the project, a great guide on ACH and how it works was shared with me. I was able to go through that and actually understand how ACH works and how Modern Treasury builds an abstraction on top. That helped a lot with the integration, not having to just learn everything from scratch.”

Modern Treasury’s reporting tools and dashboard were also vital for C2FO. These features have helped the business keep tabs on transactions—they’ve also allowed the operations team handling day-to-day activities to more easily identify and resolve issues.

C2FO is glad to have conserved the time and resources that building and maintaining these tools themselves would have required.

“It's really nice to go into Modern Treasury and have [payments] information available,” says Sunduram. “And if we do need to build a different view internally, the availability of the data at a payment-order level makes it easy for us to be able to map and aggregate it nicely.”

Modern Treasury has helped C2FO fund cards faster and speed up payments, an important goal for their cards project. The company has also improved customer convenience.

As C2FO’s Director of Card Operations Phil Bess says, “It became obvious early in our product's life that speed of access to funds was going to be of utmost importance. Suppliers load funds on our card with a specific expense in mind, an expense for which they need to meet a deadline. Getting access to those funds to spend them is very important."

"In the span of just a few weeks with Modern Treasury, we were able to get our bank to accept payment processing, not once, but three times daily, potentially saving up to half a day for anyone looking to load funds after 8 a.m."

Phil Bess, Director of Card Operations at C2FO

Modern Treasury’s platform has empowered C2FO’s team to manage payments at scale. The results speak for themselves: C2FO’s CashFlow+ Card offering has now overseen $50m in aggregate payments, including $25m processed in one quarter alone. Not to mention 3,000-plus payment orders without a single payment return or reversal that couldn’t be swiftly resolved.

Bess points to Modern Treasury’s counterparty objects as an example of a feature that’s helped make work easier and deliver these outcomes.

“Modern Treasury has indexed everything underneath one umbrella, which is probably the best point of connectivity we have from a business standpoint. Modern Treasury has become my default solution when I need to figure out what has happened with a transaction."

Phil Bess, Director of Card Operations at C2FO

Another capability C2FO appreciates is data access for insight into transactions, which the team uses to conduct analysis.

“The data you need to confirm the health of transactions is often difficult to work with and it’s hard to get your mitts on it with some payment originators I’ve worked with in the past. That’s not the case with Modern Treasury: it’s easy and intuitive,” Bess says.

For C2FO, Modern Treasury is in a class apart. “I have yet to work with a service provider where it was easier to generate payments manually, to actually do the work and have confidence that what you were doing was accurate.”

Working with Modern Treasury, C2FO has achieved the criteria it set out for the card services back in 2021: customers have a fast and flexible system for transferring funds and C2FO has expanded its business.

Next, C2FO plans to use the card program to increase money flowing through its platform. “As an overall business we are marching towards getting $1Tn of funding on our platform during the next few years,” says Sundaram. “How we evolve the card program and what we do with the C2FO platform will help to increase the volume and velocity of money—and help us understand how we can get more suppliers using our service.”