Mercury’s Deposit-Driven Revenue Model

This revenue mix makes Mercury behave more like a startup focused deposit franchise than a software led spend platform. Most of the money comes from earning a share of yield on customer cash, so revenue rises when customers keep larger balances and rates stay high. Ramp and Brex get paid when customers swipe cards, route bills, add seats, and adopt more workflows, which ties growth more directly to finance team activity than idle cash balances.

• Mercury’s own model is concrete. A startup parks operating cash in Mercury, Mercury sweeps it to partner banks, and those banks share back part of the interest income. Mercury also earns interchange, wires, FX, and some venture debt economics, but deposits are the core engine. That is why the company benefited so directly from the post SVB flood of startup cash.
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• Ramp and Brex start from card and spend workflows instead. Their monetization comes from interchange on card spend, lower take rate bill pay volume, and paid software layered on top, like controls, approvals, procurement, travel, and expense seats. In practice, a customer has to keep transacting inside the product for revenue to keep compounding.
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• The strategic consequence is product direction. Mercury is incentivized to deepen cash custody with treasury, venture debt, and startup banking features that help founders and VCs keep larger balances in one place. Ramp and Brex are incentivized to own more of the CFO workflow, because every additional payment, approver, and software module can lift revenue per account.
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Going forward, Mercury’s biggest upside comes from turning a large deposit base into a broader banking relationship while reducing exposure to rate cycles. The winners in this category will be the ones that can add durable software and workflow revenue on top of financial rails, without losing the core behavior that brings the money onto the platform in the first place.