Mercury expands into finance workflows

Mercury is moving from being a place startups store cash to being the place finance work actually happens, which is how it protects deposits and card volume from Brex and Ramp. Once a company runs approvals, bill pay, reimbursements, and card controls inside the same product as its bank account, switching stops being a bank decision and becomes an operations rewrite.1 2 3 4 5

• Brex and Ramp won by getting embedded in day to day finance workflows, not just by issuing cards. Their core products center on expenses, bill pay, accounting sync, and approvals, which gives them many more product touches than a standalone business account.2 3 6 7
• Mercury already has the startup distribution. It built a large banking base with $500M annualized revenue in 2024, rising to $650M by September 2025, so workflow software is a way to sell more into an installed customer set instead of paying to acquire each product user separately.1 4 8
• The category is converging into all in one finance platforms. By 2026, Mercury and Ramp were described as converging across treasury, bank accounts, corporate cards, and expense management, while Brex positioned itself as an all in one option between the two.5 2 9

The next phase is a fight over the system of record for startup finance. Mercury is likely to keep adding software that sits closer to approvals, payables, payroll, and accounting, because the company that owns those daily workflows gets the best retention, the best cross sell, and the clearest path from startup bank to full finance stack.4 5 7 10