Mercury Moves Accounts from Evolve to Choice

Mercury’s move shows that in sponsor banking, the prize is not signing tiny fintechs first, it is proving reliable enough to inherit scaled ones when they need a safer home. Mercury had already become a very large fintech, with $500M in annualized revenue in 2024, over 200,000 customers, and $20B in deposits, so moving those accounts meant Choice was being trusted with a live, high volume operating base, not a pilot program.

• For Mercury customers, this was a real plumbing change. Businesses had to update account and routing details anywhere money moved, including payroll, bill pay, and customer collections. The fact that Mercury kept deposits through that process shows how sticky its product is, and how much sponsor bank reliability matters behind the scenes.
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• Choice and Column play different roles in the new setup. Choice is a sponsor bank that lets fintech users hold regulated accounts under its charter. Column adds a more vertically integrated bank and API stack, so fintechs can open accounts, move money, and issue cards through one system instead of stitching together multiple vendors.
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• This migration also fits a broader reshuffle in BaaS after Evolve’s June 14, 2024 cease and desist order tied to weaknesses in fintech oversight. As regulators pushed harder on partner bank controls, scaled fintechs like Mercury and Brex moved toward chartered banks with tighter infrastructure and fewer intermediaries.
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The next phase is a smaller set of sponsor banks handling a bigger share of serious fintech volume. That favors banks like Choice that can pass compliance scrutiny and operate cleanly at scale, while the largest fintechs keep adding backup partners, and eventually pursue their own charters to control more of the stack directly.