Leaders in Tech had a good problem: more cash on hand than it needed in the short term, the result of a significant donation received a few years earlier.
The organization invested those reserves in CDARS through Amalgamated Bank, which made sense at the time. But as rates on those instruments declined steadily over the following 18 months, the return on locked-up funds kept shrinking.
What made it harder was that Leaders in Tech didn't know there was another option. The CDARS structure required a recurring calculation every six months: should they pull the money out, or reinvest? It was a decision that carried both administrative overhead and a mental load that fell on Hannah, Director of Operations, and Keenan, the organization's finance lead.
Meanwhile, the rest of the organization's operating cash was spread across three banking institutions, largely for FDIC protection purposes after a high-profile bank failure in the area rattled their board. The fragmentation kept the money safe, but it wasn't working very hard for anyone.
The organization wasn't actively searching for something better. A participant in one of their own programs mentioned Crescent in passing. That was the turning point.
When Leaders in Tech looked at the demo, the most immediate realization was that they could earn above their CD rate* on funds that remained liquid, with no lockup periods, no renewal decisions, and no tradeoff on FDIC coverage†.
Through Crescent's connection to the IntraFi network, their full operating balance would be covered with access to millions in aggregate FDIC insurance† across institutions, resolving the fragmentation they had built out of necessity.
The comparison to Mercury helped close the decision quickly. Leaders in Tech was already comfortable operating within a fintech environment, and the demo made clear that Crescent's platform was familiar enough that onboarding wouldn't be disruptive. The cards, receipts, QuickBooks sync, and spend controls mapped closely to what they already knew.
Hannah's takeaway after the demo: it looked like a flip-a-switch transition, not a heavy lift.
And what surprised Hannah most was how responsive and hands-on the support was for a fintech company.
“I really wasn't sure how much of this would be 'get on board and then you're on your own.' That really hasn't been my experience.” — Hannah Knapp, Director of Operations, Leaders in Tech
The half-year CD renewal calculation is gone. So is the mental overhead of tracking whether it was time to pull funds or reinvest.
Hannah estimated that the combination of actual time spent and the background dread of the task added up to roughly two hours a month, not enormous, but the kind of recurring friction that quietly taxes a small operations team.
More meaningfully, the yield picture changed. Funds that had been earning a few dollars a month in a checking account or locked up in CDARS at declining rates are now earning a competitive APY* on a fully liquid balance.
For Leaders in Tech, the clearest line between interest income and mission is scholarships. The organization funds participation for people who can't afford their programs independently, and the majority of scholarship recipients are people of color, women, and others who don't have access to the capital networks that make tech careers more accessible. Every dollar earned on reserves is a dollar that can go toward expanding that access.
"There's a percentage of what we hold that goes toward scholarships. The people who request them are most often people of color, women, the people the big VCs don't fund. Being able to earn more on the money we're holding makes it possible for us to fund those scholarships." — Hannah Knapp, Director of Operations, Leaders in Tech
Hannah's advice to other nonprofits who might hesitate at moving to a platform that looks as modern as Crescent is straightforward:
"You can trust it. Crescent has done what it set out to do: create a layer of fintech over all the things that happen in the banking world that makes it easy and rewarding for nonprofits to use." — Hannah, Director of Operations, Leaders in Tech