I've founded many companies of many sizes, from 0 to 85 employees, over the last 25 years.
I've used many business banks in many countries. (Wells, Citi, HSBC, ING, BoA, BNZ, OCBC, DBS, Wise, even private banks.)
But I've never been so impressed and happy with my bank as I am with Mercury.
Mercury continues to impress me, even though right now I'm a super-small-fry, their service, features, and attention are top-notch. I love them. I'm a Mercury fan.
I believe they are doing things right now that do not scale so that they can get reviews like yours. It is a strategy to create loyal customers at the beginning.
I'm not sure but I think PG has talked about this strategy.
Unless that business is in crypto, in which case you'll freeze their account. This happened to us, which halted our payroll and hurt us. We had to scramble to find an alternative, which is now Brex.
To Mercury's credit, their staff was responsive the entire time in helping us transition. But the fact that they couldn't give an ETA on when things would resolve with their partner bank was distressing for us.
I do not think it is fair to complain about regulated banking when you yourself deliberately do stuff with crypto. Even more so when you mention that this particular institution was helpful with resolution out of the hole you dug yourself into.
I don't want to start a debate on how crypto should be treated, but currently it is treated the way it is.
+1 to Mercury. And from the what I’ve seen from other founders / CEO using you all, I’m not alone!
Incredibly easy setup, great UI/UX and no nickeling and diming with fees of any kind. Makes me wonder what are your unit economics like as you obviously will be making losses from the very smallest of customers?
Mercury is awesome! Not sure if this is right venue for feedback, but if only you could offer ACH without Plaid (which feels like a huge invasion of privacy), it would be even more awesome. Wire transfers cost 20$ each, depositing by check feels like the 1990s and takes time to clear.
I assume they will support FedNow instant payments as they’re rolled out over the next 18-24 months. Those payments cost the financial services provider 5 cents per transaction up to between $100k and $500k (depending on configuration with the Fed). They settle immediately 24/7/365. Wires via FedWire will be reserved for amounts between $500k and $50M, which doesn’t sound like a $20 fee would be unreasonable for to account for human review of the transfer.
Edit: I didn’t even know Mercury doesn’t charge for sending wires. As a customer, I’m delighted.
To clarify, when rawtxapp said "Wire transfers cost 20$ each", they probably mean wiring _to_ Mercury from their bank costs $20. Mercury doesn't charge for sending wires.
The reason they're mentioning the 3rd party bank fees is they'd prefer to use ACH pull to have Mercury take the money directly from their existing bank account (similar to how your gym or electric company might do). We do offer this, but only if you use a service called Plaid to link your third party bank account.
This involves typing your bank's username/password/2FA into a Plaid iframe on our website, which confirms it with the third party bank. If you've used Venmo, that's using Plaid under the hood to link your bank account.
Ok, all that said, my question for rawtxapp: are you mostly asking for us to verify 3rd party bank accounts via microdeposit instead? I agree it's less privacy invasive, but, definitely pretty slow and 1990s like you said about checks. I'm not sure of the security either.
I'm somewhat hoping it's less of an issue as more banks move to doing OAuth in Plaid, instead of sharing passwords. Capital One, Wells Fargo, and Chase do this now (we should really move to doing it too).
> are you mostly asking for us to verify 3rd party bank accounts via microdeposit instead?
Yes, I'm fine waiting a couple days for the initial setup if it means I don't have to let Plaid see every single transaction coming in and out of my account (and see my password in plaintext and all that). If you'd support USDC deposits, that would be even better (instant settlement with no reversibility, so no risk to you), but I'm guessing that might be a stretch. Regardless, Mercury is a very nice service as is, thank you!
FWIW I always configure my bank to bank transfers with micro deposits - I am very uncomfortable giving plaid my credentials. It takes a couple days which is lame but feels much safer.
So if I manage to catch your ear, can I ask if there are plans to allow earlier ACH (or even better, RTP) in the future? It's a mild annoyance that even scheduled ACH transactions don't go out until the last ACH window of the day - especially when I'm paying myself! :)
It's definitely not a deal breaker, but it's the kind of thing I'd be willing to actually spend a few cents on to cover the transaction costs - earlier settlement means better Fridays for me!
Hey abofh! I lead the engineering team responsible for payments at Mercury. We're definitely looking at adding better and faster payment rails in the future, but I think that your scheduled ACHs should go out in the first ACH window right now. It's possible that your receiving bank isn't posting them until later in the day, but we send those first thing in the morning when pre-scheduled. If you want to email me, I'm happy to double check that for you. jake at mercury dot com
For someone facing issues like this, you can often use another bank as an “intermediary” especially for personal accounts. Pull from your spendy bank using TD Ameritrade and then push it into Mercury.
Maybe I am displaying my ignorance for banking costs for larger business, but I have lived across NZ, AU and multiple EU countries and I never recall having paid for wire transfers neither for private nor small business accounts. Is this common even outside the US or a US only thing? $20 per wire transfer sounds insane to me. How do they justify that cost?
While it's great to maintain good enough unit economics to not have to pull stunts like this one, it's not necessarily always a plus from a customer perspective.
Comparing Mercury and Brex/Ramp specifically, Mercury is notably missing rewards on transactions, while Ramp has unlimited 1.5% cashback, and Brex has a bunch of multipliers ranging from 7x to 1x points.
If I have access to all of the options above, it would be financially irresponsible for me to spend through Mercury.
Would like to see Mercury get more competitive here even at the cost of less cushy unit economics.
EDIT: Some of the replies here seem to think Brex is shutting down entirely? Please read the actual article and the founder response above. They're only shutting down operations for small businesses, presumably because that's the only segment that doesn't have sustainable unit economics. % rewards on spend from interchange revenue has been around for decades. The model works, given the right set of customers and credit risk profiles.
I'd guess that a factor in Brex's shutdown was that these rewards are unsustainable. That seems like a good reason for Mercury not to adopt the same practices.
That's totally understandable, for the small business segment.
I was just saying that for a VC-backed tech startup, the lack of rewards is a huge turn-off, compared to some of the other options for spending available to us.
I don’t know of many banks that offer high reward debit cards. IMO Mercury has almost perfected the banking experience, and I am perfectly happy with that.
If I want a high-reward card I’ll get an Amex Platinum (a credit/charge card) and stick with Mercury as my bank.
That's a perfectly valid choice! FWIW, I actually do like Mercury's UX marginally better than Brex.
I would just prefer to have my banking and spending in 1 place, and if I did that with Mercury, I'd be sacrificing 1%+ rewards, which I would not consider a financially responsible option when Brex exists and has a good enough banking experience.
Wouldn't it be nicer for everybody if there were more options that had both a great banking experience and credit-level rewards that all competed for our business? That's all I was trying to encourage with my feedback, but the fanboyism in this thread has proved to be too strong for that message to get through.
Personally I would much prefer to keep my banking (cash storage) separate from my credit. To me, it is nice to have a barrier between the two. This way, your credit provider won't randomly decide to shut you out of your bank because you're too small!
Your feedback was literally, "I don't like you because you're not doing the thing that <company that's kicking everybody to the curb> is doing." Ironic is exactly the word for your feedback.
> Brex has a bunch of multipliers ranging from 7x to 1x points.
sounds like Brex has been losing money on unit economics while making it up on volume, and now with VC money tightening ...
Wrt. small business vs. startup - i'd guess that any company older than 3-5 years which hasn't become big enough (in spending or revenue) and not showing fast growth can be considered a small business :)
If I had to guess, I'd say the biggest contributor to poor unit economics for small business vs startups is credit losses.
Startups usually have tons of cash in the bank to underwrite against, which made them actually very safe to lend to, unintuitively enough (that underwriting model was Brex's original innovation, remember?).
Whereas small businesses usually don't, but still need a reasonable credit limit to spend with, so they end up having to underwrite using traditional data sources like credit scores and whatnot, and they probably haven't been able to develop a sophisticated enough model quickly enough to curb losses, and the recession certainly isn't going to make things any easier.
So, anticipating further accelerated credit losses down the line, this is them throwing in the towel on that whole experiment.
Sometimes a bank compliance team can not legally say why a bank applicant is not approved. In those situations we can also not tell an applicant that, that is the case.
Though that is pretty rare, if you email me your company name/email I can take a look to see if I can provide more insight. We generally try to accept everyone we can legally accept if they are not in a prohibited industry etc.
Exporting -- unless I'm missing something, it's only possible to export a CSV for transactions matching a filter. For better or worse, QBO etc formats are the standard for importing a statement to reconcile and there's extra friction each month to import a CSV.
Misleading -- Tea Room (for us) does almost nothing which was advertised:
- Treasury was marketed to be available to everyone who isn't taxed as a sole proprietor. We're a non-profit, and found out after moving all our money that we weren't eligible. I asked support to clarify this, and it looks like they've removed /all/ information about eligibility from the site which is a small improvement I guess.
- There don't seem to be any startup deals for Tea Room members. There isn't anything on the page on the site for Tea Room.
- We haven't gotten any tea. (I don't actually care about that, but come on, it's in the name.)
We moved to Mercury because Treasury would have been immensely useful to us. In all other ways BofA is /fine/ and we would not have moved if it were advertised honestly. I think it's deceptive because none of this was obvious to us before we planned out a migration and wired the $270k over to get access.
Exporting - From my understanding the CSV format matches the QB specification. Are you saying that it matching the filters is an issue or that the format is incorrect.
Treasury for nonprofits - We only just launched Treasury (in December) and nonprofits are a relatively small part of our business so this hadn't come up during our alpha. I am going to investigate why our clearing house does not support nonpfotis, and make sure the restrictions is clearly stated.
Tea Room Deals/Perks - We recently launched this https://mercury.com/perks. Did you see this already and it doesn't match what you want or did you miss it?
Tea - We were revamping the tea packaging so it might be on pause right now. But we do really ship some pretty nice tea normally :).
The other thing that you get with tea room is free domestic + international wires.
Anyway, I can see why your experience was disappointing. I really appreciate the feedback and hopefully we can improve to deliver something better in the future.
Thanks for the response. (And for anyone else watching, he also DMd me on Twitter which was nice.) I didn't realize Mercury was a startup which makes the oversights more understa
I did not see the perks, thanks for clarifying that. They are not linked on the dashboard and homepage cannot been loaded when logged in.
And to clarify we don't use Quickbooks. QBO/QBX is a specific file format which most accounting systems expect when reconciling a statement. CSVs /work/, but require you to remap the fields manually which is tedious.
Your accounting software doesn't support CSV templates? I had a similar issue with a different bank and in the reconcile feature you can pick the template (eg QBO, CSV, etc) and under CSV are the templates I made (along with stock templates for $BigBank). So I only made the template once with a little drag/drop page and was done. All subsequent imports are "one click" easy
NetSuite requires CSVs to be in a predefined format. No mapping options at all. [1]
(You might think "just don't use NetSuite" but most large companies are using NetSuite. Small-business accounting systems do not work well past a certain scale of transactions/purchasers/vendors/etc.)
Does it export in all formats likes he’s claiming it doesn’t? Can you point to documentation? Usually, and not always, when someone makes a shadiness it’s directionally hinting at someone.
We have a QB export compatible file. It's an export button on the top of our transactions page and has date, description, amount, status, bank description, reference and notes as column.
I don't think we have specific documentation of that feature, but I am happy to demo it. Our api documentation is here: mercury.com/api.
I am sure there is something specific Tyler was talking about. Would love to learn what it is so we can fix it.
+1 for Mercury. Super simple signup, and great UI. Love that there's a mobile app! Real nice to have virtual cards.
Only nitpick is when my co-founders linked their bank accounts to Mercury to transfer money, Mercury displayed their personal account balances (after unlinking their accounts, their personal balances no longer showed up). I had to wire transfer since Plaid didn't work for my bank.
> Displaying personal balance - Thats come up before, will try to get a fix prioritized for that.
Leaking information about a personal account when it has only been used authorized for the purposes of transfer seems to be a P0 bug to me, from a disinterested third-party point of view. If I authorize a transfer of $10k to my startup and for some reason my co-founder is able to see that my personal account balance at Bank of America is $400k, that sounds like...a massive leak of information that I didn't authorize.
Or do I have a mistaken view of what the problem is?
99% of the time Plaid functionality is used to transfer money from your previous business bank account to Mercury. In that scenario it's useful to have balance information.
Most people transfer money from personal account via another means (checks, wire etc). Though agreed that it's bad when a personal account is used and the balance is leaked to cofounders.
It's bad, but not a "massive leak". Few people keep much more than the FDIC limit in a commercial bank for their personal account no matter how much money they have.
We switched to Mercury only to discover you don’t support wiring money to all countries (we need South Africa support). Perhaps this (hopefully temporary) limitation could/should be included in your FAQ? In the interim we’re going to look into Pilot for team payments. Anyone here using Pilot?
Thank you, I’ll email you directly. Your super quick response on a previous HN thread was a key reason we decided to sign up with Mercury in the first place...
What's your business model? The product looks outstanding, but I, like many others here I'd imagine, am somewhat skeptical of a product that sells itself as nearly completely free for the user.
We make money on debit card usage (interchange) and deposits that sit with us. We will be adding a couple of other revenue streams this year.
We have pretty good unit economics and the bigger we get the more money we make. Agreed that you should be skeptical of anything that makes a loss on a per user basis.
What sort of interest rates do you offer for folks who are conserving cash right now? I realize interest rates are low in general, but it seems foolish to be getting literally zero from my current bank.
+1 for Mercury. My only feature wish is the ability to write paper checks (not send via mail). It comes up occasionally (e.g. in CA need to give paper checks to employees on the spot when terminating).
same here. happy mercury customer. just disappointed the webapp wasn't build mobile friendly from the start. the UI is simple enough that it should've been working on mobile!
should've used a responsive CSS framework vs using css modules. recreated the wheel for not a lot of value.
I don't think CSS modules are the issue to making it responsive. We just decided to focus the design/engineering resources on making mobile apps instead of responsive web app.
Ideally we would do both though, and hopefully we can in the future.
> I don't think CSS modules are the issue to making it responsive. We just decided to focus the design/engineering resources on making mobile apps instead of responsive web app.
i agree that CSS modules aren't the issue but it def makes it easier to be responsive when you use a CSS framework. i think it would've been nice to be responsive from the start. relatively less resource intensive if written using bootstrap and maximizes customer value by making it easier for users to browse it on mobile without installing an app.
Why don't they just charge a higher price to buyers who don't pay cash now? I understand there is a lot of demand, but this does not compute with me. My spidey senses would be going off.
This works for private buyers, but these gov agencies have a regulation that doesn't allow them to pay in advance ever. The price isn't the issue. So they can only buy from really big firms, who don't have stock right now and aren't flexible.
Sure, but why do all of the smaller firms absolutely need cash right now? If they sell to a government or large entity, payment is all but assured. Even if they have a high discount rate, they can factor that into the price. There's no way they all need the money now to remain in operation.
We are way past discount rates here. Firms without enough cash won't survive. Even if you double or triple the price, it doesn't help if you're out of business when they pay weeks or months later. That's why some kind of financing is needed for larger orders that need like $ 1/4m to 1m in outlay first.
Can Chinese banks provide bridge financing? You'd think they would be happy to, since half of them are state-owned and China is in a position to help other countries afflicted by Coronavirus.
The bank can give the mask company money now. Once the American NGO receives the masks, it can directly pay the bank. That way the bank does not have to worry about the mask company stealing its collateral. The bank might even offer to pay for the provision of masks as a donation from China.
Mercury | React+Typescript, Haskell Engineer, Support, BD | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | ONSITE or REMOTE (US)
Mercury (mercury.com) is building banking products for startups. We are currently ~30 people and have raised $26m from top tier investors (A16Z, CRV, and more).
We launched less than a year ago (April 2019) and have 5k+ happy customers.
This is my 4th company. My previous company, Heyzap, was YC09, was funded by USV and was acquired for $45m.
Mercury | React+Typescript, Haskell Engineer, Visual Designer, BD | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | ONSITE
Mercury (mercury.com) is building banking products for startups. We are currently 26 people (13 engineers, 2 designers, 5 BD/Ops) and have raised $26m from top tier investors (A16Z, CRV, and more).
We launched 10 months ago and have 5k+ happy customers.
This is my 4th company. My previous company, Heyzap, was YC09, was funded by USV and was acquired for $45m.
Nevertheless it probably won't ever be completely reliable short of installing a hypodermic needle with the sensor to take a blood sample every time :)
Mercury | iOS Swift, React+Typescript, Haskell or generalist Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | ONSITE
Mercury (mercury.co) is building a bank for startups. We are currently 14 people (8 engineers, 1 designer, 5 BD/Ops) and have raised $6m from a tier A VC (A16Z). We launched 4 months ago and have 2k+ happy customers.
This is my 4th company. My previous company, Heyzap, was YC09, was funded by USV and was acquired for $45m.
Backend: Haskell
Frontend: React/Redux/Typescript/iOS/Android
Infra: NixOS, AWS
We like generalist engineers and happy to hire smart people that are willing to learn.
My email in profile or email jobs AT mercury DOT co.
Also hiring for Accounts, Marketing, engineering interns and other roles.
If you are looking for an alternative, we are 100% committed to businesses of all sizes:
A) the smallest businesses can be the next big startup
B) We maintain strong unit economics at all sizes.
We setup a landing page to get these customers onboarded quickly: https://mercury.com/partner/brex