Mercury charter expands low cost midmarket lending
Flex
Mercury winning a bank charter would shift the contest from product bundling to balance sheet economics. Today Mercury sits on top of partner banks and shares away part of the spread it earns on roughly $20B of deposits, while Flex mostly monetizes card interchange and Net-60 credit. If Mercury becomes the bank, it can keep more of deposit economics, control the ledger and compliance stack directly, and use cheaper deposits to fund larger credit products for bigger customers.
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Mercury already runs a banking led model at much larger scale than Flex. It reached $650M in annualized revenue by September 2025, with most revenue tied to interest income on customer deposits. That matters because a charter removes the revenue share paid to sponsor banks, so the same deposit base can produce more gross profit.
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The cost stack Mercury could compress is concrete. In the partner bank setup, one company owns the customer app, while banks like Column and Choice hold deposits, move money on the rails, and take economics for doing it. Owning the charter pulls those layers into one entity and reduces both vendor dependence and margin leakage.
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Flex has a different engine. Its core offer is a Net-60 card for owner operators in trucking, logistics, and construction, and revenue comes mainly from card swipe fees, interest on extended payment terms, and FX fees. That works well for high spend SMBs, but it does not give Flex the same low cost funding base a chartered deposit franchise could give Mercury for mid market lending.
If the charter is granted, Mercury can move upmarket with a stronger hand. The likely path is from startup banking and treasury into larger revolving credit, venture debt, and operating finance for mid market companies, using deposits as cheaper fuel. That would make banking first neobanks harder to compete with for any player whose economics still start with cards rather than deposits.