Cash visibility and scalable payments | Handshake finance

1. The Company Context

Handshake is a digital escrow platform for service-based businesses, designed to support situations where payment and service delivery occur at different times.

The platform supports milestone-based escrow and secure payments, giving both clients and service providers clear visibility into how funds are held, released, and tracked. Funds are released only when agreed-upon conditions are met, helping reduce payment risk, disputes, and uncertainty for both parties.

Handshake is designed to fit naturally into day-to-day business operations. Instead of handling payments as one-off events, businesses use Handshake to manage contracts, milestones, and payments as part of a single, structured process. This makes it easier for teams to stay aligned, track progress, and reconcile payments without relying on manual follow-ups or spreadsheets.

2. The Challenge: Before Finmo

From day one, Handshake understood that handling client funds requires rigorous treasury discipline, transparency, and control. As a regulated escrow platform, it was critical to maintain strict segregation between client and company funds and to track precisely balances held, released, or withdrawn.

As the business prepared to enter new markets and, eventually, conduct cross-border transactions, the challenge was to ensure the foundation was strong enough to scale without friction.

When you’re handling client funds, there’s no room for shortcuts. You need full visibility, strong controls, and confidence that your financial infrastructure can scale with you.

Christopher chan, Co-Founder, Handshake Finance

Rather than waiting for complexity to create operational pain, Handshake focused early on building a treasury stack that could support growth, liquidity management, and multi-market expansion from the outset.

3. The Solution: Why Finmo

Handshake needed a treasury and payments partner that could safely hold client funds, clearly separate escrow funds from company funds, and provide a real-time view of funds at any given moment. Just as importantly, that setup needed to work not only for today’s volumes, but as Handshake scaled into new markets and more complex use cases.

Finmo provided the infrastructure to do exactly that. By partnering with Finmo, Handshake centralised its escrow flows, payment movements, and balances in one place, with clear controls and real-time visibility across all client-held funds. This gave the team confidence that funds were properly segregated, traceable, and ready to scale without adding operational risk.

What mattered most for us was knowing exactly where client funds were at all times, and being confident that the setup would hold up as we grew. Finmo gave us the visibility and control we needed without adding operational complexity.

Jun Xian Lee, Co-Founder, Handshake Finance

Finmo’s platform was integrated directly into Handshake’s existing workflows, enabling escrow transactions, reporting, and controls to operate within the platform rather than as manual back-office processes. This meant Handshake Finance’s team could focus on building its product and serving customers, without needing to design or manage complex treasury operations internally.

The onboarding process played a key role in making this possible. Finmo worked closely with Handshake’s commercial, technical, and operations teams to design the right fund flows, reporting structure, and controls from the outset. As a result, Handshake was able to launch on a strong foundation, with treasury processes built for scale rather than retrofitted later.

4. The Impact

Unified visibility and stronger control

With Finmo, Handshake now has unified, real-time visibility across all pay-ins, payouts, and escrow balances, tracked at a granular, per-client level. This clarity enables faster decision-making, stronger cash management, and more effective client follow-ups.

Operational efficiency at scale

While Handshake’s internal treasury operations were built for scale from the start, the real impact is seen downstream. By embedding escrow into service-based workflows, Handshake helps its customers move away from manual invoicing and spreadsheet-driven tracking.

For service providers using Handshake, this translates into at least one hour saved per transaction across invoicing, payment follow-ups, and reconciliation, replacing fragmented processes with an automated, milestone-based flow.

More strategic collaboration internally

The improved visibility has elevated Handshake’s finance function from operational oversight to strategic enablement. Finance, operations, and leadership teams now work from a shared, real-time view of fund flows, enabling faster alignment and more confident decisions as the business scales.

5. The Vision

Handshake sees Finmo as a long-term partner in its growth journey. Finmo’s strong presence across Southeast Asia provides a solid foundation for Handshake’s regional expansion, particularly in markets where trust gaps are larger and escrow plays a critical role in enabling commerce.

As Handshake moves toward cross-border escrow and more complex multi-currency use cases, real-time visibility, reliable payment rails, and scalable treasury infrastructure will be essential.

For other fintechs and fast-growing platforms, Handshake’s advice is clear: build for scale early.

By partnering with regulated, proactive infrastructure providers from the start, companies can avoid the operational drag that often accompanies growth, and instead focus on delivering value, trust, and great customer experiences.