Digital banking startup Mercury is a lby uploading software to their bank accounts, giving its business customers the ability to pay bills, issue invoices and reimburse employees, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The additional features put the company in much more direct competition with the likes of Brex and Ramp, two rival fintechs that have been fighting for market share for years increasingly crowded space.
The fintech, which has been offering banking services to startups and other firms since 2019, is expanding first by offering accounting automation and more sophisticated bill-pay features through new software that might be integrated with its bank accounts, executives told TechCrunch exclusively. It may also begin offering invoicing and reimbursement to employees in the summer.
Mercury says it has greater than 200,000 customers who send $4 billion in outgoing payments through its platform each month.
“As companies become more sophisticated, they want to have more control over these payments in terms of approvals, and they want these payments to be better integrated into their accounting system,” CEO and co-founder Immad Akhund told TechCrunch in an interview. “Our plan is to continue adding more such elements to the bank and its offer [customers’] financial stack.”
Competitively speaking, these moves put Mercury up against fintech firms, not only Brex and Ramp corresponding to Navan, Airbase and Mesh Payments, but also incumbents corresponding to Bill.com, which also offers an invoicing solution.
In particular, this puts Mercury in much more direct competition with Brex, which also offers bank accounts, corporate cards, bill payments and expense reimbursement. Both firms were owned by fintechs benefited the most When Silicon Valley Bank Failed in 2023 — although Brex growth has been reported to have surged last 12 months it stopped a bit.
While Mercury is well-known in the startup world and that is the group it began serving, Akhund says today’s startups make up lower than 40% of its clients as the company has diversified over the years. Other segments it serves include: e-commerce, life science and investors. Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman recently told TechCrunch venture-backed startups represents a “minority” of its customer base. Meanwhile, Brex initially focused more on startups before the announcement push into the enterprise and his own software attack and then a reducing pressure on smaller firmsand then later renewed commitment to start-ups.
New workflows
With advanced bill pay software, customers will find a way to pay bills directly from their bank accounts with features corresponding to AI-powered bill detail entry, duplicate bill detection, and the ability to approve payments on mobile and via Slack.
Previously, Mercury’s business customers could make payments to vendors, and for a time it offered bill pay functionality, including optical character recognition (OCR) for invoices, “but it didn’t provide a more complete bill pay workflow in a way that may completely replace tools bill pay services offered by third parties to larger customers,” the company said.
On top of this, the company now also provides accounting automation, including a new integration with NetSuite that can, among other things, enable the categorization and synchronization of bills and expenses as they are initiated.
This summer, Mercury may also offer businesses the ability to create skilled invoices, allow customers to pay with bank cards or directly from their bank (via ACH), and the ability to send automatic invoice reminders. They may also find a way to establish refund policies and track expenses.
The new software “includes the ability to establish tighter approval controls and accounting integration so that all invoice-related activity is automatically recorded correctly,” the company told TechCrunch. “That’s why we’re bringing more enterprise resource planning (ERP) business-type capabilities to market, built around the bill-paying cash flow aspects we already had.”
Access to the new workflows is free until August 1. After that, the company will offer a number of paid plans depending on the size of the company and its needs – ranging from $35 to $350 monthly.
Like other digital banks, Mercury is not a bank itself. It provides banking services through partners Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust. It began offering a corporate bank card about 18 months ago.
Square alumnus Dan Kang, who serves as Mercury’s vice chairman of finance, said the variety of customers Mercury has makes the company able to offer additional products.
“It’s not just about people parking money at Mercury after SVB was introduced,” he told TechCrunch, noting that Mercury’s finance team beta-tested all new products themselves. “They actually use it to run their business.”
Expanding into software is not the only branch Mercury has made. Startup too recently expanded its operations to incorporate personal banking. In addition to earning revenue from interface fees and rate of interest differentials, Mercury will make money with this new offering by charging users an annual subscription fee of $240 with their first payment.
All of those moves come at an interesting time for Mercury, which made headlines earlier this 12 months as the goal of federal scrutiny over its practice of allowing foreign firms to open accounts through one of its partners, Choice Bank, in response to a report prepared By information.
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