Digital banking startup Mercury overlays software on top of its bank accounts to give corporate customers the ability to pay bills, issue customer invoices and reimburse employees, the company said. spoke exclusively to TechCrunch. The additions will put the company in more direct competition with rival fintech companies such as Brex and Ramp, which have long competed for market share in an increasingly crowded field.
The fintech, which has been providing banking services to startups and other businesses since 2019, will expand by first offering accounting automation and more sophisticated bill payment capabilities with new software that integrates with bank accounts. executives told TechCrunch exclusively. The company also plans to begin issuing invoices and providing reimbursements to employees this summer.
Mercury says more than 200,000 customers transfer $4 billion each month through its platform.
“As companies become a little more sophisticated, they want to have more control over payments in terms of authorizations, and they want to better integrate payments with their own accounting systems,” said Imad, CEO and co-founder.・Akhund said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Our plan is to continue to add more of this type of building block to the bank, [customers’] financial stack. ”
In terms of competitiveness, the move puts Mercury ahead of not only Brex and Lamp but also fintech companies such as Navan, Airbase and Mesh Payments, as well as incumbents such as Bill.com, which also offers invoicing solutions. You will be competing against companies.
Among other things, this puts Mercury in more direct competition with Brex, which also offers bank accounts, business cards, bill payments and expense reimbursement. Both companies were among the fintech companies that benefited most from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, but Brex's rapid growth was reported to have stalled slightly last year.
Mercury is well known in the startup world, and it was among these groups that it launched, but as the company has diversified over the years, startups today account for less than 40% of its customer base. says Akhand. Other segments served by the company include e-commerce, life sciences, and investors, among others. Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Greiman recently told TechCrunch that venture-backed startups are a “minority” of the company's customer base. Brex, on the other hand, initially focused on startups before announcing its own foray into enterprise and software, then lowered its focus on small businesses, and then launched a new focus on startups.
new workflow
Advanced bill payment software lets your customers bill directly from their bank accounts with features like AI-powered bill details entry, duplicate invoice detection, and the ability to approve payments via mobile or Slack. You will be able to pay the book.
Previously, Mercury's business customers could make payments to vendors, and for some time, some bill payment features were offered, such as optical character recognition (OCR) for invoices. “It will completely replace third-party bill payment tools for large customers,” the company said.
On top of that, the company now also offers accounting automation, including a new NetSuite integration, which allows things like categorizing and synchronizing invoices and expenses at the outset.
This summer, Mercury will also give businesses the ability to create professional invoices, allow customers to pay directly from their credit card or bank (via ACH), and send automatic bill reminders. You can also set reimbursement policies and monitor spending.
The new software “includes the ability to establish more granular approval management and accounting integration, so all invoicing activity is automatically and properly recorded,” the company told TechCrunch. “So we're going to be introducing a lot more business enterprise resource planning (ERP)-type functionality that builds on the money transfer aspect of bill payments that we were already offering.”
Access to the new workflow is free until August 1st. The company will then offer a variety of paid plans ranging from $35 to $350 per month, depending on a company's size and needs.
Like other digital banks, Mercury is not itself a bank. We provide banking services through our partners Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust. The company started offering corporate credit cards about 18 months ago.
Dan Kang, a Square alumnus and Mercury's vice president of finance, said given Mercury's customer base that the company is ripe for additional product offerings.
“It's not just that people are putting their money into Mercury post-SVB,” he told TechCrunch, noting that Mercury's own finance team beta-tests all new products. “They're actually leveraging this to run their business.”
Expanding into software isn't the only area Mercury has been doing lately. The startup recently expanded into personal banking. In addition to making money from exchange fees and interest rate spreads, Mercury plans to make money through its new service by charging users a $240 annual subscription fee on their first deposit.
All of these moves come at an interesting time for Mercury, which earlier this year was involved in a federal lawsuit over its practice of allowing foreign companies to open accounts through one of its partners, Choice Bank, as reported by the Information. It made headlines after becoming the subject of government surveillance. .
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