Sam Aarons
Co-founder & CTO
Modern Treasury
Biography
Sam is co-founder and CTO of Modern Treasury, which provides payment operations software for companies to move and track money with confidence. Sam co-founded Modern Treasury to alleviate the pain points that his team experienced while building a payment operations system at LendingHome. Before LendingHome, Sam co-founded and served as CTO at Agustus & Ahab, and worked for Everlane and Rearden Commerce. He earned his BS from Columbia University, where he also worked on hacking projects. Sam is known to celebrate company milestones with Krispy Kreme deliveries.
How is the nominee propelling the industry forward?
The world of payments is increasingly digital. Soon, every payment will begin and end in software. Sam Aarons, CTO of Modern Treasury, is on the cusp of this evolution as a technology visionary and implementer.
Sam’s council and thought leadership has been appreciated by Nacha at numerous speaking engagements and webinars as well as by the Federal Reserve. Sam was part of the FedNow steering committee to implement FedNow, the real time payment network joining the previously launched RTP Network.
Sam’s insight and leadership resulted in changes to the FedNow system that ensured that all loops be closed on payment reconciliation, specifically, that FedNow payments tie back to credits and debits to a master FedNow account. Without Sam’s input, this feature may have gone lacking. Modern Treasury, at Sam’s urging, also joined the Faster Payments Council, which proliferates the growth of RTP, FedNow and real-time payments. Sam will be Modern Treasury’s council representative.
At Modern Treasury, Sam leads the engineering team that is automating payments, enabling companies to more easily move money with confidence including via Global ACH. Small companies can send payments manually. That workflow doesn’t scale. There’s too many errors and bugs. We need computers talking to computers to make it easier to scale payments operations. Modern Treasury’s operating system platform, which Sam envisioned and executed, makes this happen across all rails: ACH, wire, check or RTP/FedNow. Sam’s work and innovation propels the industry to new ways to do things, more efficiently.
With automated payments, technology has to be flawless. There is no “good enough” when moving money. Modern Treasury’s infrastructure software has to be fast, user friendly, and battle hardened for security and reliability. Sam’s team, with Sam as lead, sets the new standard for such software in payments and money movement.
Where do you see the nominee succeeding in the future?
Innovation is where Sam will succeed in the future and continuously propel the industry forward and challenge it to find new and better ways to do things.
For example, Sam is working now on a FedNow White Paper describing the use of a QR Code that he authored for an RTP and FedNow world. The technical specification will be free and available for anyone to use, and will push payments toward a standardized QR code. This will make payments more “click and pay,” without having to enter in shipping and billing information over and over again. The code will include account and routing numbers to complete orders.
That’s a huge convenience to the shopper. But merchants will also benefit because they won’t have to pay the 3% credit card transaction fee. Initially, the QR code will work with the FedNow system, which allows for certain levels of remittance information required to pull it off, but it could be modified to also work with the RTP network.
In the background, Sam will continue to succeed at the technical work to make it possible for more companies in all industries to modernize their payments and financial systems, thereby enabling greater money movement efficiency throughout the entire economy. Sam’s success will come in pushing payments closer and closer to be instant, real-time, start to finish, so that companies always have 24/7 real-time insight into cash and cash flow, have money that is always working, and are better positioned to service customers, unlock new growth, and seize opportunities.
Look for Sam to also continue to succeed in thought leadership in the ACH community, specifically via his close ties and allegiance to Nacha, which he’s been involved with ever since Modern Treasury was founded and he was one of three people in the company.