Mercury Pursuing a Bank Charter
Mercury
Mercury is moving from being a software layer on top of banks to becoming a bank that can set more of the rules itself. As a partner bank fintech, Mercury could design the interface and workflow, but core account structure, compliance boundaries, and some product limits still sat with Choice, Column, Evolve, and other bank partners. A charter would pull those decisions in house, which matters most for deposits, payments, and venture debt as Mercury scales past 200,000 customers and hundreds of millions in revenue.
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Today, Mercury already looks more bank like than a simple app layer. It earns on deposit balances, cards, wires, FX, and venture debt, but those products are delivered through partner banks that own the charter and regulator relationship. Becoming a national bank would let Mercury keep that stack under one roof instead of coordinating across multiple institutions.
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The practical reason this matters is control in moments of stress. Mercury has said some workflows are hard to make fully seamless without being the bank itself, and the company has repeatedly added partner banks for redundancy. After Evolve received a Federal Reserve cease and desist order in June 2024, Mercury shifted customers toward Column, Choice, and Patriot, showing both the resilience and the limits of the partner model.
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There is also a lending angle. Venture debt is becoming a major product, with Mercury lending $200M in 2022 and $1B in 2023 and 2024. In the partner model, Mercury shares in lending economics while another bank carries the chartered lending apparatus. A charter would make lending, deposit gathering, and treasury feel more like one integrated balance sheet business, closer to a modern startup focused SVB than a pure fintech front end.
The next phase is Mercury using a charter to tighten the loop between software, deposits, payments, and credit. If approved, Mercury would look less like a neobank renting bank capacity and more like a digital national bank built for startups, with the ability to ship products faster, standardize risk decisions, and turn banking infrastructure into a stronger moat around venture debt and treasury.