Connect with Sam Strasser
Before you read the feature below or listen to the episode, connect with Sam Strasser, CEO and co-founder of Treasure Financial.
Linkedin: Sam Strasser
Company: Treasure Financial
Sam is building at the intersection of corporate treasury, fintech infrastructure, registered investment advisory services, stablecoin reserves, agentic AI, and small business cash optimization. His work is aimed at a problem almost every business owner understands but too few solve well:
What should your company be doing with idle cash?
Treasure Financial exists to help businesses put every dollar to its highest and best use, without forcing owners, operators, CFOs, founders, and fintech platforms to manually become corporate treasury experts overnight.
TL;DR Key Takeaways
Sam Strasser grew up in an entrepreneurial family, surrounded by people who built companies, sold companies, and treated business creation as a natural way to move through the world.
Treasure Financial is Sam’s fourth company. The idea came from a pain point he experienced directly in a previous business, where the company had about ten months of cash sitting on the balance sheet, and the bank was unwilling to offer a better yield.
A conversation with the CFO of Airbnb opened Sam’s eyes to the power of corporate treasury. At Airbnb, treasury was not a back-office afterthought. It was a meaningful financial engine that helped the company put cash to better use.
Sam applied similar treasury tactics to his own company and says it increased the bottom line by about 7% that year. That became the aha moment behind Treasure Financial.
Treasure’s mission is to democratize corporate treasury for small and medium-sized businesses, giving them access to cash optimization strategies usually reserved for larger companies.
The platform helps companies identify idle cash and allocate it across managed money market, managed treasury, and managed income strategies, with a focus on after-tax yield, liquidity, safety, and avoiding unnecessary concentration in one institution.
Treasure is both a software-first technology company and a registered investment advisor. Sam sees the RIA structure as what enables the firm to serve customers properly while building the technology layer around treasury management.
Treasure serves direct business customers and also offers an API product for fintechs, neobanks, FX platforms, stablecoin companies, and other financial technology businesses that want to embed treasury offerings without building the regulatory and investment infrastructure themselves.
The company has around 350-plus platform customers and roughly 10 API clients, with the API side becoming a larger focus as fintech platforms look for regulated, professional treasury infrastructure.
Treasure uses Apex as a custodial partner and charges a management fee that starts around 35 basis points, with lower tiers based on deposit size.
The typical minimum can be as low as $10,000, but Sam says the average entry point is around $250,000, and the average customer holds around $5 million with Treasure. The company presently serves small businesses as much as $125 million in revenue.
A major theme of the conversation is that most companies still leave cash sitting in checking accounts, earning very little, while banks use those deposits to generate revenue. Treasure is built to shift more of that value back to the business owner.
Sam has deployed more than 75 internal agents at Treasure with a team of only seven full-time humans. Agentic AI has changed how the company works, hires, serves customers, manages operations, and thinks about scale.
Sam believes advisers will still matter in an AI world, but their role will shift. They will need to become more like system designers, technologists, fiduciary interpreters, and relationship-centered guides.
The deeper message: corporate treasury is no longer just for giant companies. In an era of AI, stablecoins, cash preservation, changing rate environments, and compressed business margins, every serious owner-operator needs to ask whether their idle cash is working as hard as they are.
Why You Should Listen to the Full Episode
This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Sam Strasser is not just a fintech interview or an RIA of the future. It is a story about a founder who saw a hidden inefficiency sitting on his own company’s balance sheet, followed that frustration into the world of corporate treasury, and built Treasure Financial to bring institutional-grade cash optimization downstream to the small and medium-sized businesses that banks too often overlook.
It is about why the cash sitting in your business account may be one of the most underutilized assets in your entire enterprise.
It is about why large companies have long understood that treasury is a strategic function, while smaller businesses have been trained to treat idle cash as something that simply sits at the bank.
It is about why the bank’s incentive is not always your incentive.
It is about what happens when cash preservation, after-tax yield, liquidity management, stablecoin reserves, API infrastructure, and agentic AI all collide inside one increasingly important category.
It is also about the future of advisory work. Sam believes AI will change the role of advisers, not eliminate the need for fiduciary responsibility. The adviser of the next era may need to understand technology, systems, workflows, agents, compliance, investment architecture, and human relationship management all at once.
Most of all, this episode is about stewardship:
Stewardship of cash.
Stewardship of business.
Stewardship of time.
Stewardship of family.
Stewardship of the future humans who will inherit whatever systems we build now.
Press play on this conversation with Sam Strasser of Treasure Financial if you are a business owner, founder, CFO, adviser, fintech builder, stablecoin operator, or family office trying to understand why corporate treasury is becoming a front-line wealth strategy.
Because in a world where every dollar matters, idle cash is no longer neutral. It is a decision.
An Owner Operator Who Found Treasure in Idle Cash
Before Sam Strasser became the CEO and co-founder of Treasure Financial, before he was building corporate treasury infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses, before he was talking about stablecoin reserves, agentic AI, embedded treasury APIs, liquidity ladders, after-tax yield, and the future of fiduciary technology, he was a founder with too much cash sitting in the wrong place.
That is where the story begins.
Not with a market thesis. Not with a pitch deck. Not with a consultant’s white paper about fintech disruption. But with a problem on a balance sheet.
Sam had built companies before. Treasure was not his first venture. It was his fourth. He had grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, with a father who had started and sold several companies and a broader family culture where building a business was not some exotic life path. It was normal. It was what people did when they saw a problem and believed they could bring something better into the market.
That background matters because Sam did not come to treasury strategy as an outsider fascinated by financial jargon. He came to it as an operator.
He had cash in a company. The cash was sitting there. And the bank was not helping.
The Bank Said No
At his previous company, Sam had roughly ten months of cash on the balance sheet. Like any responsible operator, he looked at that cash and wondered if it could be doing more. He went to the bank and tried to negotiate a better yield.
The answer was not useful.
The bank was not willing to change the economics in a way that meaningfully helped the business. That moment revealed something every business owner eventually learns, but not always clearly enough: the bank’s incentive and the business owner’s incentive are not identical.
The business owner wants safety, liquidity, access, yield, flexibility, tax efficiency, and operational simplicity.
The bank wants low-cost deposits that stay put.
That mismatch is easy to ignore when rates are near zero or cash balances are small. But when a company has meaningful reserves, when the rate environment changes, when margins matter, and when every dollar needs to contribute to the enterprise, idle cash becomes more than a line item.
It becomes a question of stewardship. Sam went looking for a better answer. That search led him to the world of corporate treasury.
The Airbnb Aha Moment
The breakthrough came when Sam connected with the CFO of Airbnb. That conversation opened his eyes to how large companies think about cash. At companies like Airbnb, treasury is not merely an administrative function. It is not just “where the cash sits.” It is a sophisticated internal discipline designed to manage liquidity, risk, yield, duration, tax implications, banking relationships, capital efficiency, and the highest and best use of every dollar.
Sam was struck by the scale of the impact. He says that at Airbnb, a meaningful portion of revenue was coming from treasury activity. Whether someone hears that as a precise number or simply as an illustration of magnitude, the lesson was clear: corporate treasury could materially affect the economics of a business.
So he began applying some of those tactics to his own company. The result, he says, was a roughly 7% improvement to the bottom line that year. That is not a rounding error.
For a founder, that kind of improvement does something to the imagination. It turns a frustration into a thesis. It turns a bank account into a market. It turns a hidden operational discipline into a product opportunity.
Sam realized that the problem he had experienced was not unique. Thousands of small and medium-sized businesses were likely sitting on idle cash without the tools, guidance, infrastructure, regulatory wrapper, or time to manage it well.
Large companies had treasury departments. Smaller companies had checking accounts. Treasure Financial was born in that gap.
Democratizing Corporate Treasury
In 2018, Sam sold his shares in his previous company to his partner and went full-time into building Treasure. The mission was simple to say and hard to execute: democratize corporate treasury for small and medium-sized businesses.
That phrase can sound polished, but the underlying idea is practical. Treasure was designed to help companies identify idle cash and allocate it into strategies that could generate better returns while preserving liquidity and managing risk. The platform takes a process that would otherwise require specialized expertise and turns it into something a business can implement quickly.
Sam describes the onboarding as taking around ten minutes. Once a business is signed up, Treasure helps identify idle cash and allocate it across three core investment vehicles: managed money market, managed treasury, and managed income. The portfolios are built with an after-tax yield perspective, with attention to liquidity, safety, concentration risk, and the macroeconomic environment.
That after-tax point matters. Many business owners compare headline rates without fully understanding entity structure, tax treatment, treasury bills, money markets, C-Corps, pass-through entities, state taxation, and the different implications of where cash sits. Treasure’s job is not just to chase yield. It is to help make sure the cash is being put to its highest and best use in a way that fits the company’s actual needs.
This is the difference between a teaser rate and a treasury strategy.
The Fourth Company and the Almost-Failed Round
Treasure may have begun with a strong insight, but the path was not smooth. Sam initially tried to bootstrap the company. That was his instinct. He had built before, and bootstrapping had appeal. But after roughly six months, it became clear that if Treasure was going to get off the ground and scale properly, it would need outside capital.
The first funding round began around late 2019. The company had a strong lead investor and was looking to raise roughly $2 million to $2.5 million.
Then COVID hit. The round fell apart.
The financial institution that had been prepared to lead had to reduce its ownership percentage because of a regulatory change. It could no longer play the same role. At the same time, fear and uncertainty locked up capital across the market. Investors pulled back. The world froze. For a minute, Sam did not know if Treasure would even get started, let alone make it to the next stage.
But the company kept plugging away.
Eventually, Catalyst came in as the first major investor, putting in roughly $1 million to $1.5 million. The team hit the ground running, scaled from there, and later brought on additional investors, including Peter Thiel and Jump Capital.
That part of the story matters because fintech infrastructure businesses can sound inevitable once they exist. In hindsight, people can look at Treasure Financial and say, of course, small businesses need better treasury management. Of course, cash optimization should be automated. Of course, fintechs and stablecoin companies need embedded treasury APIs.
But in real time, companies are built through fragile windows.
A round almost dies. A regulatory change alters the cap table. A pandemic locks up capital. A founder decides whether to keep going. That is the part of company building that the press release never captures.
Software First, RIA by Necessity
One of the most interesting tensions in Treasure’s identity is that it is both a software company and a registered investment advisor. Sam is clear that Treasure thinks of itself as a software technology company first. The company is constantly working on code, algorithms, automation, operations, and increasingly agentic AI.
But the ability to serve customers in the way Treasure does requires the RIA structure. That combination matters. The firm is not simply a fintech dashboard. It is not simply a bank account alternative. It is not simply a yield product. It is a technology layer wrapped around a regulated advisory function designed to help businesses manage short-duration cash and treasury needs.
That regulatory side creates responsibility. It also creates a moat.
In a world where someone can claim to rebuild almost any SaaS feature in a weekend, regulated financial infrastructure remains different. The software matters, but so does custody. Compliance matters. Investment advisory status matters. Operational controls matter. Liquidity management matters. Customer trust matters.
You can copy a screen. You cannot instantly copy eight years of regulated operating context.
The Customer: From Owner-Operators to Stablecoin Companies
Treasure’s customer base has expanded across several distinct segments. On the direct platform side, the company serves businesses that want to manage corporate cash more effectively. Sam says the minimum can be as low as $10,000, but the average entry point is closer to $250,000, where the strategy begins generating more meaningful returns. The average customer holds around $5 million with Treasure, and the company works with businesses up to roughly $125 million in revenue.
These customers can include owner-operated businesses, venture-backed companies, and other corporate clients with different liquidity needs. A venture-backed startup that just raised a round may be able to ladder cash more predictably. A manufacturing business may have more irregular liquidity demands. A stablecoin company may need extreme liquidity because tens or hundreds of millions of dollars can move in and out on a daily or near-daily basis.
The point is flexibility.
Treasure connects to a company’s accounting data so it can better understand when cash may be needed and where that cash should sit. The goal is to make sure the company always has access to its funds while the money earns as much as it reasonably can during the time it is sitting there.
That is the core promise. Liquidity first. Yield intelligently. No unnecessary lockup.
The API Layer
Treasure is also building through an API product that serves fintech platforms, neobanks, FX companies, stablecoin businesses, and other financial startups that want to offer treasury functionality without building the entire regulated infrastructure themselves.
This is where the business becomes especially interesting. Treasure can allow another platform to roll out a treasury offering to its user base in as little as 30 days, taking on much of the compliance and investment infrastructure burden because Treasure is the RIA.
Sam describes working with fintechs and stablecoin companies where Treasure acts as the reserve partner, managing investments for dollars converted into stablecoins such as USDC. The company also actively manages short-duration portfolios and adjusts treasury strategies as the yield curve changes.
When the yield curve moves from inverted to normalized, your treasury strategy has to change. That is not something most founders, CFOs, or fintech platforms want to manage manually every week.
Treasure does that work.
On the direct platform side, Treasure has hundreds of customers. On the API side, Sam says the company has around 10 API clients and has been increasing its focus there over the past year. That makes sense. As financial platforms proliferate and everyone looks to embed more value into their product, treasury-as-infrastructure becomes a category with obvious demand.
Not every fintech wants to become an RIA. Not every neobank wants to build treasury expertise. Not every stablecoin company wants to manage short-duration reserves alone. Treasure Financial can sit underneath them.
The Bank’s Float Is the Business Owner’s Opportunity Cost
One of the most important parts of the conversation is Sam’s explanation of the banking system incentive. Most companies still leave funds sitting in checking accounts, earning very little. Meanwhile, banks use those deposits to make loans, manage their balance sheet, and generate revenue.
That is not evil. It is banking. But the business owner should understand the trade.
If a company has $5 million or $10 million sitting in an account earning 25 basis points or 50 basis points while other short-duration options may offer materially more, the opportunity cost can be meaningful. As rates decline, the gap between what banks pay on deposits and what active treasury management may be able to capture becomes even more important.
Sam’s point is that business cash should not automatically become someone else’s cheapest funding source.
The cash belongs to the business. The benefit should accrue to the business. Treasure exists to help more of that value flow back to the company that earned the money in the first place.
That message should land with any owner-operator who has spent years fighting for revenue, margin, payroll, customer retention, and survival. If you worked that hard to earn the cash, why would you let it sit unexamined?
The Difference Between a Cash Account and a Treasury Strategy
The conversation also touches on platforms like Bill.com offering cash accounts and yield-like products. Sam’s distinction is important. Many platforms can offer attractive rates as an acquisition tool. Sometimes those rates are capped, subsidized, tiered, or structured as marketing.
That does not make them useless. But it does make them different from a treasury strategy.
Treasure is not trying to win customers with a teaser rate. The firm’s management fee starts at around 35 basis points and can decline based on the amount deposited. The yield a customer sees is meant to reflect the actual treasury strategy rather than a promotional acquisition offer.
That difference matters to serious operators. If you are managing $250,000, $5 million, or $25 million in corporate cash, you are not simply looking for a cute rate on the first slice of cash. You are looking for a repeatable system that helps manage liquidity, risk, duration, tax implications, access, and yield over time.
A cash account is a feature. Treasury is a discipline.
Agentic AI Inside the Treasury Company
Then the conversation takes a turn. Sam reveals that Treasure has deployed more than 75 agents inside the business while operating with only seven full-time humans.
That moment reframes everything.
Treasure is not merely building a treasury platform for the AI era. It is becoming an AI-native operating company itself. Starting in late 2024 and through 2025, Sam spent significant time resetting the company’s operational strategy around agentic AI. The agents now help across compliance, engineering, customer service, and internal operations.
That changes how the company hires. It changes how roles are defined. A customer service role becomes less about manually responding to every message and more about managing a fleet of agents, adjusting prompts, monitoring data, improving workflows, and knowing when a human needs to intervene.
The job shifts from doing the task to designing and supervising the system that does the task.
That is a profound change.
Sam is careful, though. He is not recklessly throwing agents into every customer-facing interaction. Treasure is being more patient where live product and customer interaction are concerned. Internal operations are one thing. Regulated customer-facing financial workflows are another. There is a wall that should not be crossed casually.
That is the right lesson for the age of agents. Move fast where the blast radius is contained. Move carefully where trust, money, compliance, and customer harm are at stake.
AI, Family, and the Return of Time
One of the most human moments in the episode comes when the conversation moves from agents and operations to fatherhood. Sam has three young kids. Chris does too. The question becomes bigger than productivity.
What is all of this for?
Sam’s answer is practical and moving. The agents free up time. They make work-life balance more achievable. They allow him to spend more focused time with his kids and family without feeling irresponsible about the business. Instead of feeling like every email or text requires immediate personal response, he can trust systems to raise the flag when something truly needs his attention.
That is a different frame for AI. Not just replacing labor.Not just scaling output. Not just reducing cost. Restoring attention.
The founder who once had to carry every operational burden can now spend more time on the creative side, the strategic side, the family side, and the human side. Sam sees agents as shifting humans back toward ideation, creation, architecture, and direction. The agents execute more of the work. Humans become the dreamers, designers, supervisors, and stewards.
That may be one of the most important takeaways from the entire conversation. The best use of AI may not be making humans irrelevant. It may be giving humans back the space to be more human.
The Adviser as Technologist
The episode also explores what AI means for financial advisers. Sam does not believe advisers disappear. He believes the role changes.
If a person hands everything over to an agent but does not understand macroeconomics, investment strategy, fiduciary responsibility, risk, or how to evaluate what the agent is doing, they may be trusting a system they cannot properly supervise. That creates a continued need for investment advisers, but the adviser of the future may look different.
Sam suggests advisers will become more like technologists.
Chris refines that idea: not necessarily coders, but designers of systems. Advisers need to understand how agentic AI, workflows, operating architecture, and customer experience can improve their business. They need to know how technology can reduce operating costs, expand service, personalize client experience, and help them deliver more value at each moment of truth.
The investment management function itself may become increasingly automated and commoditized. But the fiduciary function does not vanish. The relationship function does not vanish. The ability to interpret, contextualize, design, and guide becomes more important.
The adviser of the future will not be paid merely to pick investments. They will be paid to architect trust.
Stablecoins and the New Movement of Money
Sam is also excited about stablecoins and the way they are changing how money moves. Treasure already works with stablecoin companies as a reserve partner, but the opportunity goes beyond reserve management.
Stablecoins compress settlement time. They make cross-border flows more programmable. They create new windows where money can be invested, moved, allocated, and optimized across time periods that were previously too short or operationally impractical to matter.
Sam gives the example of investing on rails during a one-to-five-hour flow window while funds are being sent from the United States to Mexico. Five years ago, that kind of idea would have sounded borderline impossible. Now it is becoming productizable.
That is where treasury becomes more than yield on idle cash. It becomes programmable liquidity infrastructure.
As stablecoins mature, as digital dollar rails become more common, and as fintech platforms embed more financial functionality, the ability to manage cash intelligently across very short windows may become a major source of value. Money is learning to move faster. Your treasury has to learn to think faster, too.
Cash Preservation in an Uncertain World
The macro backdrop matters. Sam notes that uncertainty creates tailwinds for Treasure because cash preservation becomes top of mind. When business owners get nervous, many instinctively move funds back into checking accounts or plain cash equivalents. But that can leave a lot of money on the table.
The rate environment is changing. Money market yields may decline. Checking account yields may drop back toward very low levels. The Federal Reserve may cut. The yield curve may normalize further. In that world, the difference between passive cash and managed treasury can become more visible.
But the point is not simply chasing the highest number on a screen.
The point is building a cash strategy that matches liquidity needs, duration tolerance, tax structure, entity type, and operating reality.
A business with irregular working capital needs cannot manage cash the same way as a venture-backed startup with a fresh round in the bank. A stablecoin issuer cannot manage cash the same way as a family-owned services company. A C-Corp may think differently than a pass-through LLC.
Treasury strategy has to fit the business. That is what Treasure is trying to automate and professionalize.
The Hidden Wealth Strategy for Owner-Operators
For the Wealth Matters audience, this conversation should feel especially relevant because so much first-generation wealth is created inside operating businesses. Many high-net-worth individuals are not rich because they inherited a public stock portfolio. They built a company. They own a practice. They operate a closely held business. They run an advisory firm, service company, real estate enterprise, family business, professional practice, or growing startup.
For those people, the business balance sheet is not separate from the wealth plan. It is the wealth plan.
That is why corporate treasury deserves more attention. Idle business cash affects returns, resilience, tax planning, liquidity, acquisition readiness, lender confidence, owner distributions, and downside protection. In uncertain markets, how a company manages cash can shape whether it survives, grows, acquires, waits, or gets forced into bad decisions.
Sam’s work brings a family-office discipline into the operating company layer. That is the larger opportunity.
Not just better yield.
Better stewardship.
The Founder Building for the Next Operating Model
Sam’s story is compelling because he is not just talking about the future. He is living inside it.
He is running a regulated financial technology company with seven people and more than 75 internal agents. He is serving direct business customers and API customers. He is managing treasury strategies across changing yield curves. He is supporting stablecoin infrastructure. He is thinking about advisers as future system designers. He is building in Scottsdale after time in Santa Monica and San Francisco. He is a father thinking about what technology gives back to family life. He is a founder who found his market by solving his own problem.
That combination is rare. It makes Treasure more than a yield platform story.
It makes it a case study in what the next generation of fintech operating companies may look like. Lean teams. Agentic workflows. Regulated infrastructure. Embedded APIs. Stablecoin relevance. Human judgment at the center. Customer cash, treated as a strategic asset, and put to work.
Closing Thought
This ATOMIQ LEVEL conversation with Sam Strasser is a reminder that some of the most important innovations in wealth are not always flashy. They do not always begin with a new asset class, a giant market call, or a speculative moonshot.
Sometimes they begin with a founder staring at idle cash and asking a better question.
Why is my company’s money working harder for the bank than it is for me?
That question led Sam into corporate treasury. It led him to Treasure Financial. It led him into a category that may become increasingly important as business owners, advisers, fintechs, stablecoin companies, and family offices realize that cash management is no longer a passive administrative function.
It is a strategy. For business owners, this episode is a reminder to look at the cash already sitting inside the company.
For advisers, it is a reminder that technology will not remove fiduciary responsibility, but it will reshape how value is delivered.
For fintech builders, it is a reminder that regulated infrastructure can become a powerful platform layer. For parents and founders, it is a reminder that AI may give us more than speed. It may give us back time.
Press play on this episode with Sam Strasser of Treasure Financial, and you will hear why corporate treasury, stablecoins, agentic AI, and small business cash management are converging into one of the most practical wealth conversations of the decade.
Because your cash is already doing something. The only question is whether it is working for you.
The real risk is doing nothing!
~Chris J Snook
