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Mercury – Banking built for startups
- superasn 7y agoReally good to see more banks who are open to international customers. Your website is also super sleek. Definitely going to switch from SVB to you guys if things work out!
- middle1 7y agoAre you guys work with Stripe, PayPal directly?
- immad 7y agoI am co-founder, CEO of Mercury. Excited to see this on HN. Happy to answer any questions. We set out wanting to: a) deliver an amazing online banking experience for startups b) help entrepreneurs understand their revenues/costs better and succeed c) deliver great financial services. We have a long way to go but are excited to unveil what we have achieved so far. Mercury will provide your startup a FDIC-insured checking account, debit card, savings account (earning 1-2%). All online, with an application that is finished on average in under 10 minutes and approved usually within a few hours. We focused pretty heavily on the UI. Hopefully you’ll appreciate little details, like our extremely flexible transaction date picker. We have a lot more to come on the product side, including better analytics to help you understand your revenue/costs and APIs to build on top of Mercury, as well as new financial services to help startups succeed. We’d love to hear any and all feedback you have. We’ll be looking at comments here all day, or you can email us directly at immad AT mercury.co, max AT mercury.co or jason AT mercury.co.
- jwr 7y agoUS-only, do I understand correctly? EU companies need not apply?
- immad 7y agoReposting from another comment: The company has to be incorporated in the US. But the founder can be foreign. Unfortunately banking is a very geo by geo thing in terms of regulation, payment rails, banking partnerships etc. We don't have any immediate plans to launch outside the US, though I would love to be global from day 1 if we could.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoWow, do you have the API docs? I'd like something for scriptable money transfers.
- immad 7y agoNot yet. If you drop me an email I can send you an update when we do. Also let me know what your specific use case is.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoWe were building a Bitcoin integration for person-to-person and one of our core use cases was allowing people to log in using their banking credentials for ACH transfers, but the issue wasn't charging them, but having us take our share, and transferring between accounts.
- jedberg 7y agoMy usual question to companies that offer banking without fees: If you aren't making money from the fees, how are you making money?
- immad 7y agoActually most banks make money on deposits and thats their primary source of revenue. We have a rev-share with the bank on deposits revenue. Most of the time there is no good reasons for there to be any fees in our opinion.
- MaxGabriel 7y agoI'm a co-founder and CTO at Mercury. We have some amazing frontend UI (the onboarding flow especially) if you'd like to check it out, and our backend is 100% Haskell. AMA
- AdamM12 7y agoReally like Haskell after taking an upper level programming language class. Interesting choice as I haven't seen/heard of many using it as a backend.
- MaxGabriel 7y agoYes it's definitely a more obscure choice. But a cult classic! It's worked out really well for us; the promise of "if it compiles it works" (mostly) holds out
- AdamM12 7y agoI know of one other company and it's a small healthcare startup in KC that uses Haskell on the backend and Elm on the front end. I guess they just loved the concepts that much.
- craigsmansion 7y agoHow did you sell Haskell? Once Haskell was decided on, how did you approach development?
- MaxGabriel 7y agoWe were a team of 3, with the CEO and myself technical, so ultimately it came down to just co-founder trust. Immad was somewhat skeptical, but after interviewing some amazing candidates who wanted to work for us to use Haskell, he's really liked it. Development was pretty simple, I just created a yesod-postgres template and we got started with authentication. Are you asking about something specific?
- 7y ago
- ridgewell 7y agoWhat exactly is the business model for this venture? Vendor lock-in?
- immad 7y agoRepost from another comment: Banks make money on deposits and thats their primary source of revenue. We have a rev-share with the bank on deposits revenue. Most of the time there is no good reasons for there to be any fees in our opinion.
- chicagomint 7y agoYour focus on API-driven banking really intrigued us, however I wasn't surprised to see that you won't bank money services businesses. Kind of a shame, because we could really use an API to help with cash management.
- immad 7y agoWe don't do MSBs on the website, but we can support them in theory. Just need extra diligence docs. Send me an email and we can try to make it happen.
- manigandham 7y agoCongrats on the launch. We're with SVB but tired of their crappy ancient tech stack and want a bank with a decent API. Mobile apps with check deposits and xero/intuit integration would be high priority features before a move.
- legionof7 7y agoI've never used startup banking before, curious what kinda thing people look to do with banking API.
- manigandham 7y agoWe are a marketing software company with a previous ad network business. Lots of bills, invoices, credits generated by our system that use APIs to send payments and record statements in accounting software but bank reconciliation is completely manual. Automating even some of it would be helpful.
- immad 7y agoOur previous business was an Ad Network. Which is partly what inspired Mercury
- immad 7y agoMobile Apps: iOS or Android or both? Any particular feature you are looking. Xero/Intuit: Which one do you use or do you need both?
- manigandham 7y agoiOS. Mobile app with ability to deposit checks and send payments/wires. We use Xero primarily.
- immad 7y agoWe will have web based mobile deposits. But yes, mobile app would be better and we are on it. Xero support should be live with Plaid in 2-3 weeks.
- ulzeraj 7y agoSadly it seems to be an US only or US centric type of service and I understand that it is as it should be since baking accounts and borders are complicated matter. Here in Brazil here have Nubank which offers lots of modern features like APIs and so but they do not offer services for business so we have to rely on old crusty bureaucratic evil banks.
- immad 7y agoSorry! I hear Nubank is great though.
- jsperx 7y agoLooks very cool. What is the preferred way to deposit checks? I see it mentioned on the FAQ as “add new funds” flow, but I’m thinking more like payment for invoices from old-school customers. Do you support an RDC scanner, or would it be recommended to use a traditional bank and then electronically transfer it in from them, or wait for a mobile app?
- immad 7y agoIf you have a ton of checks (>10/month) we are probably not the best solution at the moment. We are going to have web based check deposit going live next week and mobile in the near term.
- eugeniub 7y agoThe onboarding flow looks nice but unfortunately the document uploading doesn't work at all for me, for PDFs or JPEGs. I'm using the latest Firefox on the latest macOS.
- cheeyoonlee 7y agoWhat are the partner rewards mentioned for Tea Room?
- j-zhang 7y agoWe're starting with up to $100k in AWS credit, $1,000 off a 409a and 20% off Pilot bookkeeping for 6 months. More to come. Email me at jason at mercury.co if you want to know more.
- mNovak 7y agoCan't figure out why the tea gimmick draws me in so much, ha. Also slightly confusing--does the $250k criteria include checking+savings? Or strictly checking, as stated. But otherwise, what do you see as differentiation from something like Azlo?
- amluto 7y agoDo you have or can you add real check and ACH withdrawal security? I want my bank to decline all externally initiated withdrawals unless explicitly authorized. In other words, when I write a check, I want to tell my bank, and if someone tries to cash a check drawn on my account, I want it to be rejected. The same should go for ACH debits. This might be harder, but it would be even better if unrecognized debits we’re out of hold for a day or two so I could approve or reject them.
- immad 7y agoACH - a basic account can’t have this protection. We have an idea for an account that is for sending only that is always 0-balanced. That’s not live yet, but perhaps it would satisfy your request. Check - you can send a check to a specific person from the Mercury dashboard but you can’t print a blank check against the account. That would be rejected. So standard check fraud is not possible.
- runako 7y agore: ACH protections, it would be really useful to have the bank manage for me an account # per ACH contact. Then I could set limits on each contact (e.g. this contact is only allowed to deposit, this contact can only withdraw up to $X per week, etc.) I could also enable/disable accounts on a per-contact basis (e.g. this contact is now barred from receiving any money). Most importantly, if party A leaks my ACH info, this shouldn't help any other party.
- chewmieser 7y agoFYI this is called Positive Pay (at least for checks, although it looks like some banks offer ACH Positive Pay). We upload a file daily to our bank that says "you can allow these check numbers to go through," and anything else would be rejected.
- amluto 7y agoRight, I know it had a name. I find it rather surprising that Reg E mostly doesn't protect business accounts. IMO if an account doesn't have Positive Pay or a similar protection, then that account should get the full benefit of Reg E protections. This would probably give the banks a nice incentive to implement Positive Pay for free for all business accounts, since Reg E can be expensive and complicated for the banks.
- whitepoplar 7y agoWhat the story on fraud? I was surprised to discover that business bank accounts aren't governed by the same protections that consumer accounts are (Reg E). What happens if a criminal commits ACH fraud and is successful? Are Mercury's customers protected by some sort of guarantee, other than FDIC which only seems to cover bank insolvency?
- immad 7y agoACH fraud protection is available to Mercury customers. I believe you have 90 days to reverse an ACH. Customers do have better protection than businesses but in reality most banks extend the same rules to both.
- kisamoto 7y agoLooks good but without hijacking the thread does a service like this exist in Europe? If not is it due to different financial regulations (maybe easier to get started in the US?) or something else?
- angott 7y agoWhich features in particular do you need? If you are interested in the APIs, you might be pleased to know that starting September 14th, 2019, any bank in the EU must provide public APIs by law under the PSD2 EU directive for Open Banking. Most banks are already compliant (although their APIs are not exceptional).
- tasubotadas 7y agoIt is easier. There are quite a few alternatives: N26, Paysera, Revolut, Transferwise
- kmlx 7y agothere's like a thousand services like this in Europe. The US is lagging the UK (for example) by at least 2-3 years when it comes to banking. To understand how far behind the US is, take this example: the London Tube (subway) started accepting contactless payments at all of their stations years ago. All they did was turn it on; all the functionalities were already built into the normal card readers years before that. Here's another example: all banks in the EU are required to offer APIs for consumption.
- philip1209 7y agoI’d love if you integrated with the Stripe api to project future deposits!
- immad 7y agoThat’s part of the plan!
- smcnally 7y agoGood onboarding. Confirmation of acceptance arrived within 30 minutes of completing my application. It was great to be able to save my application progress: I started on one device, moved to another, and logged out and back in a few times while finding docs and photos between bouts of work-work. Looking forward to discovering where Mercury saves me time and hassle.
- packeted 7y agoYou can't beat free. SVB and others get you with free for x months but once their fees and "analysis fees" kick in it really gets quite expensive for a small bootstrapped business even with little activity on your account. It's also incredible how far behind all banks are with simple things like being able to search your transactions over a decent amount of time. Good luck and I genuinely hope the free and open to all model proves to be sustainable.
- immad 7y agoThe dreaded “analysis fees”! We operate at reasonable unit economics. Free should be sustainable.
- davidgh 7y agoDo you have any plans to handle deposits in currencies other than USD? We’re US-based but receive a fair amount of payments from customers in EUR and we also have obligations in EUR so we’re looking for a way to avoid going from EUR to USD on deposit and back to EUR on payment.
- immad 7y agoThat would be a cool feature. We don’t have immediate plans to do this.
- LowLevelHacker 7y agoWhat about a line of credit?
- obiefernandez 7y agoDo you integrate with Quickbooks Online?
- immad 7y agoWe have Quickbooks compatible exports. Looking into a deeper integration
- runako 7y agoSo far, I'm intrigued. But I'm also conservative when it comes to money. None of these questions are specific to Mercury, they are general to any of the fintech startups that have been popping up lately. So: - do people really use new banks like this? - how worried is it reasonable to be that bugs in the platform will cause interruption of business/money loss for customers? (I'd be particularly worried that I wouldn't immediately catch an error in the bank's favor.) - in general, is there ever a compelling reason to not wait a few years for the bank to smooth out its operations before getting on board? All that said, I love to see innovation in the space and it looks like a refreshing start!
- a13n 7y agoThis is AWESOME! A free business bank account, with great interest rates. I've been looking for this for months! The great design is just icing on the cake.
- LukeHoersten 7y agoAwesome to see other Haskell startups out there!
- truthhurt 7y agoWell, SynapseFi is backend!