It takes just seconds to see that Mercury is not a typical small-business bank. Here are its top-10 differentiating features from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and thousands of other traditional banks and credit unions. Here are nine things on its homepage that you won’t find at the vast majority of business banks.
- Clear market message to growing businesses (not even mentioning small, instead saying “startups of all sizes”)
- Distances itself from being thought of as a bank (“we are a financial technology company, not a bank”)
- Asks for just an email to get started
- Calls the sales department “sales” instead of the less understandable “new accounts” or “business bankers”
- Top nav has “product” instead of financial terms like “checking”
- Has a great product demo, which is the first item on the Product menu
- Transparent pricing, the second item on the Product menu
- Offers Venture Debt and is easily tracked through a specialized dashboard (see previous post)
- Includes built-in API access to your account
Mercury was started in 2017 in the SF Bay area and has seen rapid growth in both website visitors and customers. According to Similarweb estimates the site attracted 1.4 million visits in September (2022), an increase of 5x in the past 18 months (ref: 280,000 in December 2020). The company has been #1 on our SMB challenger bank list since becoming a unicorn with a $120M round in July 2021 (see note 1 below).
Company Vitals
Mercury Technologies
FAB Score = 347 (as of 15 Nov 2022; see notes below)
Rank = 1
– HQ: San Francisco Bay Area
– Founded: 2017
– Banking services partners: Choice Financial Group; Evolve Bank & Trust
– Raised $152M (Crunchbase) including $120M in 2021
– Valuation: $1.7B (based on July 2021 round)
– Website visits: 1.4 million (Sep 2022; SimilarWeb)
– Employees: 383 (Pitchbook)
– Articles: 14 (Crunchbase)
– Linkedin: 15,300 followers (750 employees)
– iOS app: 4.8 (872 reviews)
– Trustpilot: 3.9 (486 reviews)
- How the FAB Score is calculated: As nerds do, we are developing a proprietary score measuring the adoption of private digital financial services companies. Since most do not release traditional metrics (# customers, deposits, AUM, etc) we rely on third-party estimates of website traffic, app downloads, as well as publically reported funding (equity + debt). We call it the FAB score, standing for Fintech Attention Barometer. It’s a work in progress, so expect changes in the formula.
- Disclaimer: We personally write and stand by everything published here. We receive referral revenues from certain companies which can impact their positioning on the site. At the time of publication, Mercury is one of our partners.
