
Mercury – Banking built for startups - middle1
https://mercury.co/#
======
immad
I 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.

~~~
markh
Immad, congratulations on the launch!

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?

~~~
jumarm
I'm not apart of Mercury, but per their pricing page [0] sending domestic and
international wires are $5 and $35 respectively while receiving from both is
free.

0: [https://mercury.co/pricing](https://mercury.co/pricing)

------
MaxGabriel
I'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

~~~
craigsmansion
How did you sell Haskell?

Once Haskell was decided on, how did you approach development?

~~~
MaxGabriel
We 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?

~~~
craigsmansion
Thanks for your reply. My question wasn't specific, more of a general
approach, like how to find people and how to get started with development,
etc.

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.

~~~
MaxGabriel
Hopefully Mercury can be a success story you can cite :)

~~~
craigsmansion
I hope so. A backend using Haskell sure would be a selling point for me. I
shudder to think of the software that is currently used by many financial
firms to handle backend interactions.

Best of luck!

------
amluto
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.

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
ACH - 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
re: 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.

------
mNovak
Can'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?

------
packeted
You 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
The dreaded “analysis fees”!

We operate at reasonable unit economics. Free should be sustainable.

------
davidgh
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.

~~~
immad
That would be a cool feature. We don’t have immediate plans to do this.

------
runako
So 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!

------
chicagomint
Your 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
We 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
Congrats 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
I've never used startup banking before, curious what kinda thing people look
to do with banking API.

~~~
manigandham
We 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
Our previous business was an Ad Network. Which is partly what inspired Mercury

------
kisamoto
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?

~~~
angott
Which 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).

------
smcnally
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.

------
jsperx
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.

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
If 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.

------
ulzeraj
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.

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
Sorry! I hear Nubank is great though.

------
whitepoplar
What 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
ACH 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.

------
eugeniub
The 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.

~~~
immad
Hi,

Do you mind sending me your email, and the picture that failed. Sorry about
that.

~~~
eugeniub
I emailed you at the email address in your profile. Thanks!

------
superasn
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!

------
a13n
This 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.

------
philip1209
I’d love if you integrated with the Stripe api to project future deposits!

~~~
immad
That’s part of the plan!

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

~~~
immad
Repost 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.

------
cheeyoonlee
What are the partner rewards mentioned for Tea Room?

~~~
j-zhang
We'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.

~~~
a13n
$1,000 off a 409a? How much would the 409a cost after the discount?

Asking because our 409a cost us about $1,200...

~~~
j-zhang
To clarify, it's through a specific partner (fast409a) which usually charges
$2,000. Sorry, should have specified in the original post.

------
LukeHoersten
Awesome to see other Haskell startups out there!

------
middle1
Are you guys work with Stripe, PayPal directly?

~~~
sctb
Aside: we've removed “Show HN” from the title because it's for stuff you've
built.

~~~
oceliker
FYI I still see it in the title

~~~
sctb
Indeed. Thanks!

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obiefernandez
Do you integrate with Quickbooks Online?

~~~
immad
We have Quickbooks compatible exports.

Looking into a deeper integration

------
truthhurt
Well, SynapseFi is backend!

