[immad]

CEO of Mercury here.

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

[sivers]

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.

[_vvhw]

Wow, this is high praise coming from Derek Sivers.

This should immediately be on Mercury's landing page. :)

[felipemnoa]

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.

[immad]

Support is <5% of our revenue.

If the product mostly does what it should then support costs shouldn’t be crazy.

(Assuming that’s the part that you think is unscalable for us)

[aaaaaaaaata]

> If the product mostly does what it should then support costs shouldn’t be crazy.

One of the huge benefits of not hacking your product together as fast as humanly possible!

[divyekapoor]

+1 - have had a super solid amazing experience with Mercury. Highly recommended.

[dopeboy]

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.

[friendzis]

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.

[dopeboy]

They should have refused to take me in as a customer.

Also, no hole was dug into. Their partner bank, Evolve, decided one day we were too risky of a business.

[aaaaaaaaata]

> you yourself deliberately do stuff with crypto

It's...their business?

Also, responsive ≠ helpful.

[JaakkoP]

+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?

[rawtxapp]

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.

[toomuchtodo]

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.

[MaxGabriel]

(I'm CTO of Mercury)

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).

[rawtxapp]

> 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!

[brd529]

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.

[abofh]

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!

[jkeuhlen]

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

[bombcar]

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.

[cycomanic]

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?

[toomuchtodo]

+1, I use mercury exclusively for business accounts, y’all are top notch. Congrats on the new clients headed your way.

Edit: already have a landing page up for migrating Brex folks, chef kiss

[chef0]

1000%, amazing startup banking partner. Ramp has also been amazing for expense management!

[ghufran_syed]

I have been with mercury for around 3 years and very pleased with the service and the software.

[reverseprefs]

We’ve put $millions through Brex cash/cards and will leave over this. What’s the best deal Mercury can offer us to switch? [e-mail]

[eins1234]

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.

[mtlynch]

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.

[immad]

This comment is so ironic. Love it.

[eins1234]

Nice to see you taking feedback seriously.

[immad]

Okay. We don’t have a credit card right now, only debit.

For small businesses doing high reward credit cards is not a sustainable business. Which is why Brex is shutting them down.

[eins1234]

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.

[sebmellen]

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.

[immad]

Agreed. We would need a credit card to target that spend.

Appreciate the feedback.

[rfrey]

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.

[friendzis]

> The model works, given the right set of customers and credit risk profiles.

Sooo... The model only works if you carefully cherry pick the customers?

[eins1234]

Yes exactly. That's exactly how lending works.

[trhway]

> 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 :)

[eins1234]

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.

[aaaaaaaaata]

> Startups usually have tons of cash in the bank to underwrite against

What city do you live in? Can we be friends?

[stanislavb]

I would add that Mercury seems to be the top competitor of Brex (SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/brex-alternatives).

@immad, if you verify Mercury's listing on SaaSHub, I can organize featuring it on the newsletter. Cheers!

[moneywoes]

Why is the pricing so opaque? Lets say I have a small LLC with a couple of employees. Where do I see how much that costs?

[ryanwiggins]

Mercury.com/pricing but spoiler: it doesn’t cost you anything

(Disclaimer: I work for Mercury!)

[batuhanicoz]

I tried to open a Mercury account on May 22 and still waiting for a response :(

I was happily using Brex until now.

Any suggestions to speed up the waiting?

[ptomato]

They just rejected me; I'm guessing single-owner LLCs are a no go.

[55555]

Banks that have their own banking license are better to work with imo. I hope you get one one day.

[aaaaaaaaata]

What part of their soul do they have to sell to achieve that, and maintain it?

[mritchie712]

mercury is 10/10, happy customer here.