Case Study: Earlywork

Earlywork uses Primary to automate their treasury management and maximise their yield.

About Earlywork

Earlywork are designing the fastest, fairest pathway for talent across APAC to build a career in technology. Their bootcamps are developed to help talented fellows build the prerequisite skills required to excel in tech, and to give early stage companies the opportunity to hire top talent faster. To help them deliver on their ambitious expansion plans, the Earlywork team have successfully raised pre-seed & seed rounds with support from Archangel Ventures, No Brand, Square Peg and others.

Making the most of rate rises

Given that the world had been in a low interest rate environment for nearly a decade, sound cash management was not something that was a significant value add for businesses.

However, as interest rates began their ascent in the middle of 2022, the world was watching reserve bank meetings dominate headlines. Every time rates increased, so did the need to think about how to put idle cash to work and protect against surging inflation.

Earlywork saw the opportunity to capture yield on the cash they weren’t using in operations, but figuring out where to start on investing cash was a real challenge.

“When rates started coming up, optimising cash was a new world for me. I understood term deposits, but I didn’t quite appreciate how many other options there were out there. We really needed something to simplify and automate it all for us so we could stay focused on our core business,” said Jonathan Herman, Co-founder.

Automating cash management

While searching for solutions to help them manage cash in a way that balanced low risk and high yield, the Earlywork team encountered a handful of challenges:

1. Devising a strategy distracted them from the core of their business. Taking resources away from core business activities to build a treasury strategy would have had implications on their broader focus.
2. Their existing bank was not providing a good rate. Their traditional bank could not provide higher interest accounts with the best rates as they were not an institutional customer.
3. They needed help understanding investment options. The process of building an investment framework that matched their needs was a complex task and they did not have the expertise to feel confident that they were getting it right.
4. Onboarding with new banks was an extremely time consuming process. They wanted a digital-first onboarding experience, but even getting access to term deposits meant they needed to go into a bank branch to sign documents in person.

With these barriers keeping them from activating a cash management strategy, the opportunity cost was mounting to thousands of dollars.

Getting started with Primary

Earlywork designed and deployed their cash management strategy in days using Primary. With low risk options at the core of their strategy, they invested in a mix of high interest accounts & term deposits. They fully deployed the strategy just a week later, using Primary’s end-to-end automated onboarding.

The team now use the dashboard to monitor positions, share yield data with their venture investors and make adjustments to their strategy. Earlywork have now unlocked significant yield through Primary, allowing them to extend their runway and free up funds to continue expanding the team & accelerating growth.

“We now hold around 90% of our total funds in Primary, relying on our existing bank accounts for cash reserves to fund our expenses. Having access to a sophisticated strategy with lots of yield at such a competitive price is really attractive. It means we’re able to maintain relentless focus on our core mission, while knowing that our cash is being really well optimised,” said Jonathan Herman, Co-founder.