Articles
September 3, 2025
A Fintech Aiming to Make Investing Cash in Repos Easier
# Cash and Working Capital
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CEO Kevin Cook says TreasurySpring’s fixed-term funds offer cash investment managers safety and diversification.
In 2008, Kevin Cook was working at a hedge fund that had invested more than $20 million through Lehman Brothers. The fund only recovered a fraction of that amount when it was forced to sell the claim at auction after Lehman’s demise. The hard lessons about risk learned from that experience have guided Mr. Cook and the two other co-founders of TreasurySpring, a fintech they created in 2016 that operates a cash investment platform now available to institutional investors in the U.K., Europe and the U.S.
- “The vision for TreasurySpring was to build a technology-enabled platform that allows our clients to access any of the highest quality cash investment options in whatever currency and whatever tenor they’re looking for,” he says in the latest episode of NeuGroup’s Strategic Finance Lab podcast, now available on Apple and Spotify.
Kevin Cook, TreasurySpring
Fixed-term funds. Mr. Cook explains the investment vehicle that TreasurySpring devised to meet that goal: a fixed-term fund. Each FTF offers cash investors exposure to a single asset issued by a government, bank or corporation for a fixed term ranging from a couple of days to a year. Each fund automatically self-liquidates at the end of the term, with cash being returned to the investor or being made available to roll into a new FTF.
- “It operates a lot like a term deposit in that it’s for a fixed term,” he tells NeuGroup’s Antony Michels. “But instead of having just unsecured exposure to a bank’s balance sheet, a fixed-term fund can offer access to a choice of lower-risk alternatives, including government assets and collateralized loans to banks.”
- The maturity of the assets in the fund matches the term of the fund, removing the “run risk” that exists in traditional money market funds, he said.
- TreasurySpring launched the first FTF in 2018 for a client seeking exposure to the U.K. government for two weeks. “On maturity, the U.K. government treasury bill paid back, the funds went back to the client, and then they had the option to roll them into another fixed-term fund,” Mr. Cook said.
- Seven years later, TreasurySpring has issued more than $250 billion in FTFs for over 700 clients across 28 countries and eight currencies. Investors on the platform have more than 1,000 options.
- That includes exposure to repo, the multi-trillion-dollar wholesale financing market where companies can lend cash in exchange for collateral, usually high-quality securities. The borrower (most commonly a bank) agrees to repurchase the securities at an agreed future date (the term of the loan) for a higher price, generating a return.
Repo man. Mr. Cook makes a strong case why TreasurySpring eliminates many of the obstacles facing treasury teams that would benefit from the safety of secured lending and the diversifying effects of investing in repo. Those hurdles include technology issues, complex legal agreements and time-consuming onboarding.
- “We’ve taken what is typically a multiyear, multimillion-dollar process and turned it into something that can be done literally in a couple of minutes via our secure web portal,” he said. FTFs provide corporates access “to underlying secured lending or reverse repo transactions without them having to build out any of the infrastructure or any of the legal agreements.”
- He suggested that treasury teams making the case to senior leaders to invest in repo ask, “If you get paid the same rate for a lower risk, would you do it? To which the answer is almost always, of course I would. Ultimately, that’s the repo market. That’s the access that you’re getting.”
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