How Mercury works | Banking for startups (2024)

Mercury isn’t technically a bank— but you’d never knowit.

From start tofinish, your Mercury experience iscrafted around abank account, the ultimate source oftruth for your company’sfinances.

And togive you the best possible banking experience, we’ve preserved the finest elements oftraditional banking— and cut out theworst.

You get stability and security through strategically chosen partner banks that support arange ofindustries and are less sensitive tothe volatility ofthe startupecosystem.

You’re spared from unwieldy interfaces and hidden fees because we’ve designed abanking experience that respects your startup’s time andresources.

A sweep network is aprogram that involves strategically spreading deposits across multiple banks, reducing the impact ofany single point offailure. Customers gain access toexpanded FDIC insurance coverage without having tointeract with more than onebank.

Our partner banks, Choice and Evolve, each participate in their own sweep networks that include several trusted, FDIC-insured banks — all of which can be found in the Evolve Documents and Choice Documents on our Legalpage.

Thanks tothis program, your Mercury checking and savings deposits are eligible for up to$5M in FDIC insurance coverage— 20xthe standard per banklimit.

To diversify your deposits, you can use Mercury Treasury toallocate any ofyour excess funds— for example, beyond the FDIC‑insured $5M— into mutual funds that are invested inshort-termsecurities.

Banking is complex.

But your experience with it doesn’t have tobe.

Whenever you send awire abroad, that money may pass through intermediary banks before reaching your recipient’s bank— which may lead to incurredfees.

As asender, you often don’t have visibility into the process orthe fees, which are typically deducted from your recipient’s finalsum.

While most fintechs outsource ACH file processing totheir partner banks, we do as much ofthe work in‑house aspossible toreduce the chance offraud.

Not only do we build each file tothe exact specifications ofour partner banks, but wealso use our own compliance system as afirst line ofdefense toproperly validate yourtransaction.

Only then do we hand off the file toour partner banks, who use their own due diligence instruments toperform afinal check onour work before making sure that money isdelivered safely toitsdestination.

We’ve built the security tech toprotect youfrom externalthreats.

You get todesign the guardrails tokeep employee spending and account access incheck.

Strong, industry‑standard protocols keep your data secure and confidential, atrest and intransit.

Multi‑factor authentication isenforced across all your accounts toprevent any unauthorized access. Inaddition totime‑based one‑time passwords, wesupport best‑in‑class tools like Touch ID and YubiKey toverify your identity, rather than settling for vulnerable methods likeSMS.

Unexpected logins from new devices are blocked and flagged for your review asan anti‑phishing measure.

Receive‑only accounts allow you tosafely request payments from clients without exposing your primary accountnumbers.

Once you log into Mercury, you have the power tocustomize controls that protect you from user error and bad actors asyour teamgrows.

Multi‑admin approvals let you define who can create and/or approvepayments.

Tiered user permissions— like view‑only access for bookkeepers and card‑only access for new employees— allow you toassign different capabilities todifferent teammembers.

Employee transaction limits and merchant‑locked cards automatically keep your team within company spendingparameters.

Your job is tobuild and scale asuccessful startup— not tospend hours ontedious bankingtasks.

We make every minute count, from opening anaccount topaying invoices.

Optimizing your cash management strategy involves finding arhythm for your allocations. Mercury helps you master this with auto‑transfer configurations.

Toensure you never miss payroll, you can set up atarget balance rule onyour payroll account that trigger transfers into and out ofyour savings account, depending onthebalance.

Tomake the most ofyour idle cash, you can use Mercury Treasury to automatically sweep any ofyour excess funds into yield‑earning mutualfunds.

The short answer: impossibly fast payment workflows, built onmachine learning and optical character recognition (OCR)capabilities.

When you upload aninvoice toour drag‑and‑drop bill pay tool, we automatically populate the payment details— sothat all you have todo is hitsend.

Once you’re ready, you can sync your transaction directly bytaking advantage ofthird‑party integrations with your favorite accounting software, including QuickBooks andXero.