Mercury – Banking built for startups(mercury.co) |
Mercury – Banking built for startups(mercury.co) |
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.
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.
- Are the analytics pipeable via API/sockets, or are they planned to be behind the GUI? Are you curating a plugins ecosystem with Stripe/Gusto/etc. or can anybody use the API as long as you have keys/secrets?
- How do you plan on handling customer support? I use Schwab /AmEx and I love it b/c you can get a representative on the line in less than two rings. I am always concerned of something happening that can't be easily handled with automated systems with high customer satisfaction (e.g. fraud resolution).
- I like the little things, like the tea you get if you put $250k in checkings. What kind of tea is it and how much do you get? I drink this Pomegranate Mojito high-caffeine tea from Zest Teas at the office and I love it.
Best of luck!
- API: anyone will have access to it.
- Support: We have a number and we do Intercom chat. It's mostly manned during US business hours right now.
- Tea: We are probably going to go for surprising you and not reveal the tea we send :)
Thanks!
Until federal laws change (which might be soon) we can’t bank anything marijuana related.
What was the process like for opening up a banking institution and getting FDIC insurance? Can you elaborate on the timeframe, requirements, or other unique challenges you had to deal with?
Partnering with a bank is relatively speaking not too bad. I spent 3 months talking to about 60 banks before picking our eventual partners.
There are quite a few now that have worked in the past with fin-tech companies and they are open to conversations. There are also fin-tech conferences like Money 20/20 that a lot of them go to.
1) Do you support international wire transfers? If so, any advantages in terms of fees and exchange rates over a traditional bank such as Wells Fargo?
2) Do you require hardware keys or does 2 factor auth suffice?
2) We support Authy, Authenticator and other apps that support TOTP.
Are there mobile apps? Mobile check deposit? If so, any limits on it?
Mobile apps - coming soon. Any particular features you would like to see.
Check deposits - will be live on the website first, early next week.
Limits - For most types of transactions they are $200k/day. With some variances. There are other limits. If you have a specific one in mind or want more details email me!
Yes. Probably not in the next month or so, but definitely soon after that. This is especially useful for credit card transactions since we don't offer one at the moment.
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.
Once Haskell was decided on, how did you approach development?
Development was pretty simple, I just created a yesod-postgres template and we got started with authentication. Are you asking about something specific?
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.
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.
Most importantly, if party A leaks my ACH info, this shouldn't help any other party.
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.
But otherwise, what do you see as differentiation from something like Azlo?
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.
We operate at reasonable unit economics. Free should be sustainable.
- 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!
Send me an email and we can try to make it happen.
Mobile apps with check deposits and xero/intuit integration would be high priority features before a move.
Xero/Intuit: Which one do you use or do you need both?
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.
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?
We are going to have web based check deposit going live next week and mobile in the near term.
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.
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?
Customers do have better protection than businesses but in reality most banks extend the same rules to both.
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.
Asking because our 409a cost us about $1,200...
We plan to integrate in to Stripe/Paypal and provide analytics/useful info on the Mercury dashboard.
Looking into a deeper integration
Eventually we decided to just stick with the acronym after finding out pretty much everyone we talked to knew what ACH is.
Meta:
0. How did the co-founders meet?
1. How did you guys come up with the name Mercury?
2. What's the story behind an arab-esque logo?
Thanks.
1. Mercury is the Roman god of commerce is the etymology. Jason came up with the name, so I’m not sure of his exact thought process, though
2. The logo is inspired by Roman mosaics
Xero support should be live with Plaid in 2-3 weeks.
For a URL shortner or microblog, the TLD doesn’t really matter much. But for something like a bank it’s important. There’s also the long term problem of users typing the .com and getting sent elsewhere (again particularly nasty for a bank).
Best of luck, can't wait to see where it goes!
Once you get automatic Xero sync working we'll be there!
(and less importantly (imo), marijuana is a slang term born from racist origins.[0][1])
I think that you mean 'cannabis related'.
Sorry if there is a perceived pedantry on my part; I just think that the distinction is important both conceptually and legislatively, especially given that other countries have understood the distinction between hemp and other cannabis products for some time.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/29/marijuana-na...
[1]: https://splinternews.com/the-racist-strain-of-marijuana-1822...
[0] https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressAnnouncements/u...
Missed opportunity IMO.
As an example, Silicon Valley Bank doesn't require physical presence when opening an account via Stripe Atlas.
So a small team with technically capable people with I guess little outside interference, that makes sense. I guess I was hoping for a good approach on how to make Haskell/ML/<other sane but not mainstream language> palatable to decision people who aren't all that technically inclined.
Best of luck!
I also came across a post from immad [0] on hiring for startups, and it looks like you guys have a high bar for tech talent anyway so using Haskell shouldn't hurt. I wish you the best.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120808074423/http://stdout.hey...