Mercury Workflow Advantage Over Banks
Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury, on the business models of fintechs vs. banks
The real edge in startup banking is not balance sheet size, it is workflow fit. Mercury won by turning banking tasks that used to require banker relationships, branch visits, and manual review into software that a founder can use from anywhere. That mattered because SVB proved startups wanted a bank that understood fundraising cycles, investor wires, and global teams, while big banks treated those patterns like exceptions instead of the default.
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SVB built a huge business by serving venture backed companies that mainstream banks saw as strange customers, loss making, young, but flush with cash. Mercury attacked the same niche from the bottom up, especially smaller, international, and non traditional startups that big banks and even SVB served poorly.
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The product gap is concrete. Mercury can approve accounts, move money, issue cards, and route deposits across partner banks inside one interface. Big banks often break these flows into separate teams, forms, and branch based steps, which is painful for founders running US entities from outside the US.
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This specialization also changes the business model. Mercury earns deposit revenue share, interchange, wire and FX fees, and venture debt economics without operating like a traditional bank. That lets it focus product energy on startup use cases, while Brex shows the adjacent path of layering spend software on top to move further into the finance stack.
The next phase is deeper verticalization of startup finance. The winners will bundle banking, cards, treasury, bill pay, and founder workflows into one system of action, while traditional banks keep losing the customers whose operating model is global, digital, and too fast moving for branch era processes.