Mercury, which provides banking services for startups, has launched a cash management product that aims to increase yield and “keep capital safe,” the company announced Tuesday.
The product, called Mercury Treasury, is developed for “high-growth” startups and aims to simplify and automate the way companies manage excess capital by also integrating with Mercury’s financial stack.
Immad Akhund, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Mercury, said in an interview with FinLedger that the treasury product, from the user perspective, is all integrated. Mercury helps businesses get FDIC-insured bank accounts that in addition to Mercury Treasury, also can provide tailored analytics and an API.
“You just go to the normal Mercury bank account, you can set up your treasury account, you can move money to it back and forth or set up these rules,” he said. “We hide all the complexity of moving your money, buying the mutual fund and all of that.”
Mercury Treasury accounts also consider the credibility of fund management, “flexibility of” investment vehicles and expense-to-risk ratio. The new product helps startups store extra capital in U.S. government securities and money market funds, while also automatically managing checking and savings accounts from one dashboard.
“In general banks try to make money on all of this stuff,” Akhund said. “So they make it hard to be — it’s not very transparent what they’re getting. I think it’s even appealing to people who already have this kind of facility set up.”
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of uncertainty in the markets, Akhund said this product was built with the long-term in mind.
“There’s a lot of money that’s basically on the sidelines right now, because people aren’t going anywhere,” Akhund said.
Mercury would not disclose revenue, but Mercury did hit $1 billion in cash deposits in October, which was 18 months ahead of schedule. At launch, the Treasury product will have $100 million in deposits from customers.
Going forward, Mercury is expanding its international wires from about 50 countries to about 150 countries. Additionally, the company is developing its Android app, Akhund said.
“Our long term plan is to think about all kinds of digitally-enabled businesses,” Akhund told FinLedger. “So startups are obvious digitally-enabled businesses. But so is e-commerce, a lot of professional services nowadays are mostly digital (as well).”