Mercury Transitioning From Neobank to Bank
Post-Brex Ramp vs Mercury
Mercury is no longer just packaging someone else’s balance sheet, it is moving to own the regulated core of its business. That matters because Mercury already makes most of its money from deposits, not software fees or card swipe revenue, and the failures around Synapse and Evolve showed how much operational risk sits underneath the partner bank model. A charter turns Mercury from a distributor of banking into a software led bank with direct control over accounts, compliance, and deposit economics.
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Mercury’s earlier model looked like a startup focused version of SVB, a clean app on top of partner banks and middleware. That worked when partner infrastructure was invisible. After Synapse’s April 2024 bankruptcy and Mercury’s 2025 migration away from Evolve, owning the bank layer became a product reliability decision as much as a margin decision.
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The migration to Column showed the interim solution. Column owns a national bank charter and API stack in one system, so Mercury could replace a brittle chain of middleware, sponsor bank, and card vendors with fewer moving parts. Mercury’s own charter is the logical next step, taking that same vertical integration fully in house.
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This also sharpens the split with Ramp. Mercury is optimizing for deposit spread economics and infrastructure control, closer to SoFi and Nubank, while Ramp keeps outsourcing the bank layer so it can ship workflow software faster. The result is two different end states, one becoming a bank with software on top, the other becoming finance software attached to banks.
If approvals come through, Mercury will likely use the charter to widen the gap between startup banking and general spend software. More of each dollar of net interest income stays inside Mercury, product launches depend less on partners, and the company can build lending, treasury, and back office workflows on top of its own regulated rails instead of renting them.