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One is where the money lives, one is how it moves
Mercury is the bank account a startup opens; Modern Treasury is the software layer that pushes payments across it and every other account a company holds. Two of fintech's quiet giants, solving opposite halves of the same problem.
The Quiet Software Layer Rewiring How Banks Move Money
Finzly does not ask a bank to rip out its core. It slips in beside it, gathers a thicket of payment rails into one system, and turns years-long modernization into a sequence of smaller, safer moves.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Astra
Astra is a San Francisco-based fintech that gives developers a single API to move money instantly between bank accounts and debit cards. Built on rails like Visa Direct, RTP, FedNow and ACH, its platform lets fintechs, banks and enterprises embed instant disbursements, account funding and accelerated transfers without building their own payments stack - going live in about 30 days instead of six months. Founded in 2016 by Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan, Astra has processed more than $1 billion in lifetime payments and is backed by FPV Ventures, Nyca Partners and others.
Interchecks
Interchecks is a New York-based payments infrastructure company that moves money fast and safely for high-volume businesses. Through a single API and a no-code Payer Portal, it powers both funding (pay-by-bank deposits, account funding) and payouts (push-to-card, real-time payments, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, and checks), layered with built-in risk controls and 1099 tax compliance. Its platform is used across online gaming, prediction markets, on-demand payroll, and digital banking, and the company says it has processed more than $50B in transactions.
Ankit Kumar
Ankit Kumar is a software engineer and technical leader at Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based fintech building payment operations infrastructure for companies moving money at scale. With a Master's in Computer Science from Syracuse University, he built the foundations of Modern Treasury's full-stack Payments product - an integrated payment service provider (PSP) handling fiat and stablecoin payments across ACH, RTP, FedNow, and wire rails. Before payments, his career ranged from AR helmet prototypes for BMW's CES 2016 showcase to Android apps that earned the title 'The Ultimate Camera App' from the tech press.
Modern Treasury
Modern Treasury is a San Francisco software company that builds payment operations infrastructure for businesses moving money at scale. Its API-first platform connects directly to banks and unifies ACH, wire, RTP, FedNow, and stablecoin rails behind one developer-friendly interface, with a real-time ledger and automated reconciliation built in. Founded in 2018 by three engineers who lived through the pain firsthand at a mortgage marketplace, the company has powered hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for customers like Gusto, Marqeta, Navan, ClassPass, and Procore.
Matt Marcus
Matt Marcus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based payment operations platform that processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually for companies like Gusto, Navan, and Procore. A Dartmouth computer science grad and former competitive rower, Marcus spent a year at LendingHome building the payment system that processed over $3 billion in mortgage loans - and that experience became the blueprint for Modern Treasury. He co-founded the company in 2018 with Sam Aarons and Dimitri Dadiomov, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, and has raised $183M in total funding. In July 2025, he transitioned from CPO to CEO, steering Modern Treasury toward unified fiat and stablecoin payment rails following the acquisition of Beam.