Mercury – Banking built for startups

I am co-founder, CEO of Mercury.<p>Excited to see this on HN. Happy to answer any questions.<p>We set out wanting to:<p>a) deliver an amazing online banking experience for startups b) help entrepreneurs understand their revenues&#x2F;costs better and succeed c) deliver great financial services.<p>We have a long way to go but are excited to unveil what we have achieved so far.<p>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.<p>We focused pretty heavily on the UI. Hopefully you’ll appreciate little details, like our extremely flexible transaction date picker.<p>We have a lot more to come on the product side, including better analytics to help you understand your revenue&#x2F;costs and APIs to build on top of Mercury, as well as new financial services to help startups succeed.<p>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.

I&#x27;m a co-founder and CTO at Mercury. We have some amazing frontend UI (the onboarding flow especially) if you&#x27;d like to check it out, and our backend is 100% Haskell. AMA

Do 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.<p>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.

Can&#x27;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.<p>But otherwise, what do you see as differentiation from something like Azlo?

You can&#x27;t beat free. SVB and others get you with free for x months but once their fees and &quot;analysis fees&quot; kick in it really gets quite expensive for a small bootstrapped business even with little activity on your account.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>Good luck and I genuinely hope the free and open to all model proves to be sustainable.

Do 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.

So far, I&#x27;m intrigued. But I&#x27;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:<p>- do people really use new banks like this?<p>- how worried is it reasonable to be that bugs in the platform will cause interruption of business&#x2F;money loss for customers? (I&#x27;d be particularly worried that I wouldn&#x27;t immediately catch an error in the bank&#x27;s favor.)<p>- 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?<p>All that said, I love to see innovation in the space and it looks like a refreshing start!

Your focus on API-driven banking really intrigued us, however I wasn&#x27;t surprised to see that you won&#x27;t bank money services businesses. Kind of a shame, because we could really use an API to help with cash management.

Congrats on the launch. We&#x27;re with SVB but tired of their crappy ancient tech stack and want a bank with a decent API.<p>Mobile apps with check deposits and xero&#x2F;intuit integration would be high priority features before a move.

Looks 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?

Good 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.

Looks 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.<p>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?

Sadly 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.<p>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 the story on fraud? I was surprised to discover that business bank accounts aren&#x27;t governed by the same protections that consumer accounts are (Reg E).<p>What happens if a criminal commits ACH fraud and is successful? Are Mercury&#x27;s customers protected by some sort of guarantee, other than FDIC which only seems to cover bank insolvency?

The onboarding flow looks nice but unfortunately the document uploading doesn&#x27;t work at all for me, for PDFs or JPEGs. I&#x27;m using the latest Firefox on the latest macOS.

Really 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!

This is AWESOME! A free business bank account, with great interest rates. I&#x27;ve been looking for this for months! The great design is just icing on the cake.

I’d love if you integrated with the Stripe api to project future deposits!

What exactly is the business model for this venture? Vendor lock-in?

What are the partner rewards mentioned for Tea Room?

Awesome to see other Haskell startups out there!

Are you guys work with Stripe, PayPal directly?

Do you integrate with Quickbooks Online?

Well, SynapseFi is backend!