OneAM: The Origin Story

By: The OneAM Team
Published October, 23 2025 | Estimated read time: 3 min

Pictured: Charlotte Ng (left) and Ksusha McCormick (right)

As OneAM proudly announces the successful close of its financing round, we asked our co-founders Ksusha (KM) and Charlotte (CN) to share their perspectives on what sparked the idea behind OneAM for them. 

KM: The short summary of my career is that I've spent 20 years thinking about fixed income pricing and risk. My first job was market-making on the FX desk at Morgan Stanley. Boiled down to its essence, the job was to make prices for customers no matter what was happening.  Nonfarm payrolls out?  Bank of Japan intervening?  I joined the desk in 2002, so just a few months prior my fellow traders were making prices on September 11th.  No matter the news, you price the risk and then manage it. That mindset stuck with me. 

My second job was at a hedge fund, where I traded mortgage derivatives (with John Tsai, who is now OneAM’s head of analytics). An individual mortgage reflects the value of a house, and the value of each house is a function of myriad factors, some predictable, some idiosyncratic. Nobody buys a mortgage-backed security with the expectation that every single homeowner was honest on their paperwork or that every single borrower will be able to make their payments. But if you 1) establish a quantitative profile that’s not perfect but good enough to describe the individual loans, and 2) price for the risk of fraud and default, then you're able to create large pools of complex little assets.  The pools can be traded in the secondary market, giving the buyer liquidity, and they can be hedged, which lowers the risk of holding them.  Once upon a time, mortgages were opaque, illiquid assets that sat dormant on bank balance sheets. The ability to quantify and standardize the risks created a deep and liquid market, which plays a role in lowering the costs of homeownership for Americans.   

A few years after this, I became the CEO of Decameron Technologies, and together with my co-founders (including John Tsai!) adapted advanced fixed income pricing and risk tools to the needs of large asset management firms.  Sophisticated institutional investors typically have experienced in-house portfolio managers, finely tuned return hurdles and their own ways of measuring portfolio risk.  As a result, the best analytics for this client base are very much the opposite of what good financial models look like in the movies.   

A good analytical model is NOT a crystal ball or a black box: rather, it is something that makes it easier for a smart investor to evaluate and change assumptions, to apply intuition and judgment, and, crucially, to determine whether the paradigm that governs market forces has shifted.  Instead of making you forget about the unquantifiable factors, good analytics should make it easier to weigh them. 

When I met Charlotte and started digging into receivables finance, it turned out that she had been thinking deeply about some of these issues, too, from a different angle. 

CN: I started my career as an equity analyst at Bank of America and then at Cohen & Steers, an investment manager with over $80B of assets. These early experiences taught me how to analyze a company’s prospects based on financial data, management insights, and the macro environment.  They also taught me the basic principles of portfolio management, where diversification is essential to managing risky assets. 

After this, I switched gears to join Mastercard. Mastercard is a global payments infrastructure company that connects billions of consumers and 150 million merchants, processing almost $10 trillion in volume a year. What makes it all work is what we would call a “scheme,” a combination of technology, operations, branding and franchise rules, legal structure, pricing, and interchange economics.  

What’s crucial to creating a successful scheme is not any one thing in isolation but rather the combination of all the parts. That’s what enables a vast ecosystem of unknown parties to transact in a trusted way. A supermarket doesn’t need to know who you are before letting you walk out the door with your groceries, as long as your card transaction’s been authorized, a complex process that takes only milliseconds. I spent most of my time at Mastercard developing new digital payment products, using and building upon the scheme to broaden the two-sided network. It was during this time when I met and worked with Shanthan Subramaniam, who is now OneAM’s CTO.  

The other piece that stayed with me after this experience is the power that payment access and the digitization of money can have on financial inclusion. When a consumer or a business uses electronic payments rather than cash, things like tax evasion, corruption, money laundering—the crimes that cash facilitates—tend to go away because of better data and an audit trail. Less fraud means lower prices and better affordability. As a result, economic well-being improves.  

Applying these learnings and principles to SMB working capital, I come at it from the angle of the SMB experience, the technology for processing complex data and transactions, operational servicing and payment flows, legal structure, economics – building blocks of a two-sided network to expand financial access for business owners. 

KM: Once Charlotte and I started talking, my quantitative finance and risk-pricing brain collided with her infrastructure and two-sided network brain.  Before long, we were waking up at 1am saying, "We need to build this!!" So we left our jobs 18 months ago to start this company.  Today, we're thrilled to be finally sharing the news of our institutional series seed, and look forward to executing on our vision with more resources, an amazing team, and with an amazing set of investors by our side. 

CN: By applying what we know and what we’re learning along the way, our goal is to make a sizable dent in the SMB working capital problem – a $4 trillion problem in the U.S. alone. By enabling more efficient financial access, entrepreneurs can focus on making capital investments, hiring, and growing their business. It means greater control, independence, and resilience for businesses, and a healthier economy overall. 

If you’re a small or midsize business owner looking for control and flexibility in your working capital, we would love to connect. Check out our website and contact us for a demo at info@oneam.us.