Mercury — What I Think
Mercury understood something almost embarrassingly simple. Founders hate their bank.
Not in the abstract. Viscerally, the way you hate a thing you’re forced to use that was clearly designed by someone who has never once been you. Legacy business banking is branch hours, fax-coded forms, a dashboard from 2004, and a relationship manager calling you “valued customer.” Mercury looked at that and asked, what if a bank for startups was just good software built by people who’d actually started startups. That’s the whole pitch. Shouldn’t be enough to build a company on. It was.
What the neobank crowd missed: don’t chase consumers, chase founders. The consumer neobank wars were a CAC bloodbath over people who’d switch for a $5 bonus. Mercury picked the narrow high-value wedge — tech startups with real deposits, fast growth, and a desperate need for something that doesn’t suck — and served them so well they became the default before a founder even thought to shop. Owning a small, valuable, loyal segment completely beats owning a sliver of everyone. Startups are the best customers alive. They grow, they refer, and they don’t haggle over fees when the product respects their time.
And a startup’s bank account is the root of its financial graph. Get there first, usually before the company even has revenue, and you can layer everything that follows on top — cards, treasury, bill pay, the back-office software a growing company eventually needs. “Bank account” is the beachhead, not the business, and the durable play is becoming the financial operating layer a company never has a reason to leave. Same insight Brex and Ramp had from the card side. Mercury came at it from the deposit side, arguably the stickier root.
The exposure: Mercury holds no bank charter, it sits on partner banks via BaaS. Kept them fast and capital-light, right call for getting to market. But a chunk of their fate is tied to partner-bank relationships and the regulatory weather around BaaS, which has turned stormier as supervisors scrutinise the fintech-bank middle layer harder. The deeper tension: their whole edge is software-and-trust, and trust in the place you keep your money is fragile in a way a card never is. They’ve navigated it well. But “best UX on someone else’s charter” is a position you re-earn forever, because the moat is taste and reliability, and taste is copyable while reliability is unforgiving.
Favorite & worst CEO
Founder-led, so this is on leadership. Immad Akhund is one of the sharpest founder-market-fit reads in fintech — a repeat founder who’d built and sold before, who knew exactly what startup banking pain felt like because he’d lived it, and who picked the unglamorous wedge of “make the bank not suck” over a flashier consumer story. The discipline to stay narrow, to serve founders obsessively instead of spraying for TAM, is the part I most respect. Restraint is rarer than ambition. His instinct that the account is the root of the financial graph, not the end of it, is exactly right. My one gripe is structural — build extraordinary trust and product on partner-bank rails and part of your destiny is rented, and the strongest version of Mercury keeps reducing that dependency as it scales. But as a study in picking the right customer and refusing to dilute, his Mercury is close to a model case.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.