What We Made at Treasury Prime’s First Hackathon

Treasury Prime recently held its first-ever hackathon. 

The objective of the hackathon was simple: take a week to work on any engineering and/or product-related project that’s important to you. Despite this open call, and perhaps unsurprisingly, our engineers teamed up to work on projects aimed at improving the Treasury Prime customer experience and streamlining internal workflows and tools.

Hackathons have become a standard industry event in tech — holding public or internal hackathons or challenging participants to work on and show off projects that matter to them. Hackathons also typically have a prize component for different categories determined by the hackathon organizer, and ours of course was no different. (More on that below) Some of these projects will also be shown at a company-wide offsite so that the rest of the Treasury Prime team can see what was developed during the hackathon.

We’re grateful to have developed a culture and built a team in which our engineers are excited to work on supplementary projects that make the day-to-day easier and enhance the user experience of our customers. In fact, many of these projects are in the process of being implemented.

Mike Clarke, Treasury Prime’s Vice President of Engineering introduced the Hackathon as a way to allow the technical team to unleash their creativity. “Building software is equal parts art and science,” he said. “By giving our engineers the space and freedom to build cool stuff, I was blown away by the results.”

We’re excited to share the new ideas our engineers came up with: 

Custom Debit ACH Settlement Parameters

By: Griff Bartzen, Elliot Courant, and Vatche Jabagchourian

Challenge: Enabling banks to treat ACH settlement differently by customer

Hack: Every customer is different, so this team’s custom debit ACH settlement parameters give more control to the banks in how they treat their individual enterprise clients. For instance, if Company X has been working with the bank for a year and has been settling ACH transfers routinely with no incident, the bank will likely trust Company X enough to allow for quicker debit ACH settlements — maybe in as little as 1-2 days.

Company B on the other hand may only have a few days of history with the same bank. A short settlement duration could mean a debit transfer is settled before ultimately finding out that the enterprise didn’t have a large enough balance to release the settlement.

By providing custom settlement parameters, banks can define the settlement durations for each client and ensure a smooth user experience. This team also made it even easier by providing date-specific settlement durations, so instead of individually assigning a parameter to each client, a bank could easily choose clients with 30 days of history to be subject to a specific parameter while completely new clients may get a different one.

Award: Recipient of the “Most Likely to Ship Award”. A team vote agreed that this project had the highest likelihood of becoming a full-fledged feature.

Doc Requests

By: Jon McDuffie, Aaron Walker, and Greg Custer

Challenge: Mirroring more in-product features in sandbox
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Hack: This project would allow any Treasury Prime user to make requests that they see in our API reference docs using their own authenticated user profile. This elevates the sandbox experience, adding more options for sandbox users to test (and link tests), like book transfers and status requests, as well as being able to test in different languages in real-time.

‍Award: Recipient of the People’s Choice Award, a vote put to the entire engineering team on their favorite project.

Easily Accessible Audit History

By: Jake Davis, Steve Farrelly

Challenge: Tracking changes in customer history

Hack: End users can experience many changes that affect how they interact with their finances. As explained in the video above, address and email address changes can make it difficult to receive something like a check in a timely manner.

By aggregating a customer’s historical data into an audit table, our team is able to see any pertinent changes — and when those changes occurred — in a customer’s history to find any root causes by cross-referencing a customer’s object ID.

Open APIs and Docs

By: Ryan Frawley, Anna Paliura, Brian Mo

Challenge: Maintaining and revising API docs
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Hack: Listening to feedback from customers and internal team members, this project aims at reducing the friction caused by any outdated docs. 

By leveraging massive route objects into an OpenAPI file and using that file to autogenerate docs, it can make workstreams smoother and require less manual work. OpenAPI is an open source standard that simplifies generating documentation and software development kits (SDKs). Our team explored how our platform could generate these standard file formats for our customers. By automatically generating our reference documentation, it simplifies ongoing maintenance of docs and accelerates the development for our fintech partners.

Not only does refreshing our doc generation in this way benefit Treasury Prime team members but the developers who will interact with our product as well. 

Award: Recipient of the Carrie Griffin Appreciation Award. Carrie is a founding engineer at Treasury Prime and beloved member of the team. 

Defining Params

By: Michael Gardner and Warren Mo

Challenge: Improving workflow and versatility of internal tools

Hack:Treasury Prime’s engineering team uses Clojure as its coding language. This project explored how implementing Malli, a data validation and spec library, could improve current workflow.

Malli would allow engineers to deploy unified tools to specify and design schemas in different places and their different params, like defining the shape of config data. With more tinkering to be done, early signs point to Malli being a low-lift integration that could make the lives of our engineers easier. 

Audit Storage

By: Jake Davis, Warren Mo, and Michael Gardner

Challenge: Storing and auditing historical data
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Hack: Having historical data for everything we track and capture is important, but it can add to virtual clutter.

This project proposes storing this data in Amazon S3 in a format like Parquet that can then be queried directly using a tool called Amazon Athena. This would ultimately allow easier archiving of older data while keeping all historical data easier to find and parse.

Tutorial and Code Introspection for Newcomers

By: Akash Garg and Rob Hunter

Challenge: Learning a new Clojure codebase by following code execution
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Hack: This project is aimed at onboarding new members of the Treasury Prime engineering team. Using a newly written program called Trace Route, new engineers can look more deeply at code and see what happens when specific API calls are made and how those connect to the database. 

Trace Route allows new users to pull code straight from reference documentations and quickly get any relevant inputs and applied workflows.

Which project was your favorite?

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Treasury Prime is always looking for top talent to help us build the future of American banking. If you’re interested in joining a team passionate about this cause that also always puts its people first, check out our openings.