Another thing Mercury is missing is basic expense management like attaching receipts to transactions.
If you signed up for Mercury today, you’d look at Brex and think, “Eugh, I should have signed up for Brex”.
A sweeping generalization is that Mercury and Brex are the same thing, but Brex is further ahead in terms of basic features to manage a small SaaS business. Mercury will hopefully deploy their capital to build out these features.
The Mercury sign-up process was opaque. We fulfilled all their requests and eventually they went dark on us. Turns out that they were waiting on us for something (that we didn't know they were waiting on). But we had no way to see the progress, that they were waiting on information for us, or what they thought was outstanding. Inquiries to customer support took way too long to answer (several days for a response). That support also (as I recall) was conducted through regular email, we decided that the operations didn't inspire trust and we ceased trying to engage.
After our experience with Mercury, some time later we tried Brex. The sign-up process was simple. We provided everything they asked for and our application was approved quickly and efficiently. A day or two after approval, I went to begin the process of funding the new account and was greeted with a message that the account had been suspended. As is common, no reason was given nor would their support assist in resolving the issue. A week or so later the account was terminated without explanation. Weeks after that I continued to get various account maintenance emails for the account they closed (finally had to blacklist to the spam folder, probably still getting them). Luckily we had no transactions and no open balances. I hesitate to think how screwed we'd be had we actually started transacting business.
Both of these companies offered compelling services that we were interested in and matched our needs well. Both of these companies had execution that felt completely fly by night and wasted a lot of time with no result. I get it... start-ups... move fast, break things... but with our money and ability to conduct business on the line, I was left very put out.
They're both good and much better than old-school banks like SVB / FRB etc. Brex also offers charge cards which Mercury doesn't (not sure if they have debit cards) so Brex has a broader set of things to offer.
If you signed up for Mercury today, you’d look at Brex and think, “Eugh, I should have signed up for Brex”.
A sweeping generalization is that Mercury and Brex are the same thing, but Brex is further ahead in terms of basic features to manage a small SaaS business. Mercury will hopefully deploy their capital to build out these features.