Kevin Cook was structuring a lending transaction in 2006 when a lawyer suggested doing it as a repo. Cook had started his career in corporate finance law, but this particular word sent him somewhere else entirely: property repossession and Emilio Estevez. Told that the lender’s side was actually a reverse repo, he became more confused. It is a pleasingly unceremonious beginning for someone who would eventually build a business around opening access to the same market.
He went away and learned. Over the years, the question changed. How did the transaction work? Why did so few institutions get to use it? And why should a company’s access to cash investments depend so heavily on the machinery it could afford to assemble? Cook’s story stretches across law, hedge funds, an earlier company and a partnership that predates TreasurySpring by a decade. The recurring subject is money. The recurring obstacle is the door. 1
A lawyer learns another language
Cook began at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in 2002, working as a corporate finance lawyer. In 2006, he moved to PCM, a hedge fund, where he worked on structuring and managing short-dated fixed-income portfolios. Matthew Longhurst and James Skillen, who would become his fellow founders, worked alongside him. The three were acquiring practical experience in the markets they would later try to make more accessible.
The unfamiliar word was an early education in finance’s capacity to make an intelligible idea sound forbidding. Repo is short for repurchase. In broad terms, securities are sold with an agreement to buy them back later; the arrangement provides secured financing. From the cash lender’s side, it is a reverse repo. Cook’s legal background did not spare him the vocabulary lesson. His willingness to recount it, complete with the film reference, makes a technical subject rather easier to approach.
He would come to see a second puzzle behind the terminology. Large institutions had ways to lend against collateral that required extensive arrangements. Other organisations often held cash in bank deposits. Understanding the difference became part of his working life. 2
When the money stopped moving
Then came 2008. Cook was working in a hedge fund as investors scrambled for liquidity and demanded their money back. He has described the mismatch between assets and liabilities exposed in that period: money borrowed for a short time was being lent for longer. When confidence and funding disappeared, that difference in timing became painfully consequential.
The experience stayed with him. It helped establish the importance he places on matching maturities, separating investments appropriately and paying attention to concentrated exposure to banks. Cash can look reassuring on a balance sheet while the arrangements beneath it deserve much closer inspection. The date on which money is needed matters as much as the promise that it will eventually return.
There is a reason this part of Cook’s history carries more weight than a conventional founding anecdote. His concern about financial structures comes from having worked through their failure under pressure. TreasurySpring’s subsequent design would reflect that education. The software arrived later; the questions were already there. In his account of the business’s origins, the financial crisis remains a reference point for decisions made years afterwards. 3
Three partners keep the conversation going
Cook, Longhurst and Skillen founded Autumn Capital Partners in 2010. The business advised on fixed income and cash management; Cook served as CEO. In 2013, they sold it to AgFe and joined the asset manager. Cook became a partner and head of short-dated investments. The sequence matters because TreasurySpring emerged from a working relationship with an established history.
When the three co-founded TreasurySpring in 2016, they brought different responsibilities to a shared subject. Cook took the CEO role. Longhurst’s work has centred on products, operations and, more recently, innovation. Skillen leads technology. Today, the official biographies still connect all three to Autumn Capital Partners and AgFe. It is a founding story with several chapters before the company’s first chapter.
In 2019, Cook was selected for Global Custodian’s “30 to Shape the Future”. That recognition sat alongside years of work with the same partners. For a profile of a founder, the continuity is unusually useful: it lets the reader see a business forming through accumulated experience, rather than arriving fully explained by the date of incorporation. The partnership had already encountered both market complexity and the practical business of selling a company. 4 5
The expensive door into a simple transaction
The access problem was tangible. A finance team wanting to buy government debt might need a terminal, a dealer, custody arrangements and the ability to settle a transaction. Repo brought its own legal agreements, collateral schedules and operational requirements. The investment idea could fit on a small piece of paper. The apparatus around it took considerably more room.
TreasurySpring launched its first fixed-term government bond fund in June 2018. Its Fixed-Term Funds, or FTFs, put different underlying cash investments into a standardised format. A client could buy the fund through the platform, with the underlying investment held inside the structure for a defined term. The ambition was to give finance teams access without asking each to recreate the infrastructure.
“We are all about democratising access to cash investments.”Kevin Cook
Cook’s view of the banking relationship is equally revealing. He has said TreasurySpring is not trying to replace the broad range of services banks provide. Finance teams still want their relationship banks. Giving them a way to invest through different structures can sit alongside those relationships. The practical objective is more choice: across issuers, investment types and maturities. A treasurer’s existing world has to accommodate the new tool. 6
A conceptual illustration. Terms and risk depend on the chosen product.
The investors who became customers first
Balderton’s relationship with TreasurySpring began well before its investment. The firm’s account describes meeting the team in 2016, subsequently using the platform and referring portfolio companies. That is a particular kind of introduction: the prospective investor also encountered the product as a customer.
In June 2023, Balderton led a $29 million Series B. Mubadala Capital participated alongside existing investors ETFS Capital, MMC Ventures and Anthemis. TreasurySpring said the round brought its total funding to $42 million and would support its teams, products and international expansion. The announcement named clients including Schroders, Müller, Hg and Tide, placing the company across established finance and growing operating businesses.
The timing supplied a fresh audience for Cook’s longstanding concerns. Banking failures that year had brought diversification and unsecured deposits into urgent conversations. TreasurySpring had been building before that attention arrived. Cook described companies waking up to security and risk-adjusted returns as interest rates rose and banking troubles returned. A founder who had spent years discussing the details of cash suddenly had more people prepared to listen. 7 8
Cash gets a turn on the microphone
Cook noticed the change in atmosphere with some amusement. In a 2023 post about appearing on MMC Ventures’ Beyond the Hype podcast, he said the prospect of discussing treasury under that title would once have made him laugh. Cash management had acquired the sort of public attention its practitioners had previously been able to avoid.
His conversation with MMC’s Ollie Richards covered the business of persuading investors and employees to join an effort in an overlooked part of finance. Capital efficiency was part of the discussion too. It adds another angle to the CEO’s job: alongside explaining why the market needs a product, he has to build an organisation capable of supplying it.
Other conversations show Cook looking inside that organisation. In a 2022 interview with Lucy Lewis, he discussed remote working, the risk of a two-tier culture and the need for a clear position on environmental, social and governance questions. These are ordinary management concerns with practical consequences. A business devoted to simplifying financial arrangements still has to work out how people collaborate, how they belong and what its stated principles mean in daily decisions. 9 10 11
One day, with the old rules intact
In November 2025, Cook explained the thinking behind One+, developed with Eurex Clearing and Clearstream. Some clients had cash beyond their immediate operating needs but could not confidently commit it for a week. Forecasts change. Requirements change. The useful investment horizon can be very short.
One+ was built to offer next-day liquidity through maturity-matched access to centrally cleared, collateralised repo. Cook placed the development within the rules the founders had set for themselves: consider risk-adjusted returns, offer products they would be willing to buy themselves, and avoid maturity transformation. The new product had to fit those constraints.
That is a recognisable progression in his story. An early encounter with repo led to learning the market, then questioning access, then building a route into it. Years later, the question became how to extend that route to a shorter timeframe while preserving the underlying discipline. There is plenty of technical work inside that progression. From the customer’s perspective, the useful result is a choice that matches a particular need for cash. Cook keeps returning to the relationship between those two sides of the transaction. 12
The numbers, and the people beside them
On 2 February 2026, TreasurySpring reported $350 billion in cumulative flows, more than 800 institutional clients across 28 jurisdictions and products in eight currencies. Those are measures of the company’s activity and reach. Cumulative flows count money moving through the platform over time; they should not be read as the amount held there at a single moment. 13
Company-reported figures, 2 February 2026.
Cook has also written about a smaller set of numbers: the long division involved in helping his son prepare for his 11+ exams. It prompted him to consider the difference between numerical values and the principles of a business. At an offsite in Mondaino, Italy, the team worked in groups to identify its non-negotiables. Three emerged: respect, trust and relentlessness.
“Respect. Trust. Relentlessness.”Kevin Cook, on TreasurySpring’s shared principles
His account remembers cycling, a relay race, food and wine, but gives particular weight to the way colleagues interacted. The numerical results belonged in the story. So did the people producing them. It is a fitting place to leave Cook: a founder who can spend years making financial plumbing accessible, and still find something worth thinking about in a child’s maths exercise. The large numbers tell us how far the business has travelled. The smaller scene tells us what else he pays attention to. 14