Mercury Annual Letter 2025

Dear Mercury community,

I wanted to share my reflections on 2024 and the leaps Mercury made to bring our vision for banking to life.

If you ask most people what a bank does, they’ll probably say it holds money, and maybe offers some ways to deposit or withdraw that money. If you ask them what it should do, they might not even know where to begin.

At Mercury, we think

banking¹ should do more than safely hold your money. From our first seed deck in 2017, our vision always included the cards and software you need to actually use your money (spending, sending, receiving, controlling where it goes, and so on) — and the data you need to understand your complete financial picture.

Internally, we touted 2024 at Mercury as the “year of product launches” as we took significant steps towards realizing that vision. We launched four major products for businesses — bill pay, invoicing, accounting automations, and employee expense management. We expanded into the consumer space with the launch of Mercury Personal. And we did it while strengthening our core banking infrastructure and experience.

Your bank account is essential to how your business operates, and it’s one of the first things you need after starting your business. But because legacy banks largely haven’t innovated in software, it’s created the fragmentation we’re seeing in banking and fintech. (Think: 5+ different tools for all your financial workflows that have to connect to your bank account but aren’t integrated with each other.) Founders and finance teams are stuck with needless complexity.

We’ve always thought Mercury should be built to a level of quality that feels extraordinary to customers. From our founding in 2017 through 2021, we were laser focused on building the best account for securely holding your money. The bank account is the beating heart of Mercury — and in order to enable businesses to operate at their best, we needed to get that right. But we knew we eventually wanted Mercury to power all your financial workflows from that bank account.

By the start of 2024, we had some clear indicators that we could further expand what banking could do for our customers. We’d reached a scale of supporting over 200,000 businesses, had processed more than $95B in transaction volume the year prior, had an industry-leading 80+ NPS score (compared to a banking industry average of 34), and word of mouth continued to be our biggest driver of new signups. Our profitability gave us the resources to make an investment in product expansion without taking away from our core product.

I genuinely love supporting startups, building companies, and helping other entrepreneurs — and thought it might be interesting to share what we learned last year as we pursued our vision in hopes that it might help you pursue yours.

Observe what your customers are already doing

My co-founders and I tend to take a (very) long view. We have a vision — and strong opinions — about what banking should be over not just years but decades. This gives us a guide for how to operate in the nearer-term, and how to incorporate customer feedback into our shorter-term roadmap.

When listening to customers, we look at two demand signals:

1. How customers are already using the product
2. What a LOT of customers are directly asking for

Our Invoicing product emerged from the first scenario — what we saw customers trying to do. Customers were using our Request Payment feature to do a hacky version of invoicing.

“I had been using the Request Payments feature as a simple way for us to collect payments but it was a bit of a workaround from sending a traditional invoice. When Mercury launched Invoicing, it really solved all my painpoints and is much more efficient,” said Aizada Marat, CEO and co-founder of Alma, a legal tech company that provides immigration services to founders, researchers, scientists, and other highly skilled professionals. “I love that I can create branded invoices, schedule them, and track the status of each payment from my Mercury dashboard. I never expected my bank account to do that, but now that it can, it makes perfect sense that it should.”

This is an example of a need waiting to be met — and an indication that we had an opportunity to build a product to directly serve those use cases.

In the second scenario, for years, the most common request we got (and that I received personally) was a Mercury account for personal use. And I understood why: there are no great personal banking options for our customer base of entrepreneurs and investors.

We had made such an investment in building the best banking experience for businesses and understanding the banking needs of ambitious founders and builders. Turns out that things we’d built for businesses — like easy and secure wires, custom auto-transfer rules to move money between accounts, multiple checking and savings accounts for different purposes, virtual cards with custom spend limits, and customizable permissions for different people — were pretty useful for the

personal banking² side, too.

Treat new products like internal startups

Once we decided on the bets to make, we had to set up the teams, budgets, and resources to make them happen. There were three key ways we did this.

First, we treated each new product team like a funded seed-stage startup within Mercury. We felt that new products that aren’t launched and don’t have product-market fit should be shepherded by small, independent, focused teams of engineers, designers, and a product manager (usually eight team members or fewer). Our Invoicing product, for example, started with just three people. The v1 of our Reimbursements product was built by one of my co-founders, Max Tagher, our CTO, as a hackweek project before it was transitioned to a small team to run with it. Both of these situations allowed the teams to maintain the speed and focus that early-stage companies naturally have, and kept those focused on building and maintaining the core products we already had undistracted.

When we stood up these mini, internal “startups” to develop new products, we carefully considered what level of autonomy they should have. The teams needed to be focused on what they were building and empowered to make decisions, but those decisions needed to be anchored by our overall vision and our strong opinions about what banking should be.

Second, from the outset we set usage benchmarks and revenue targets that would help us identify product-market fit. When we reached those goals, we could start to treat the team like a Series A startup and scale it, provide more resources, and so on. We assessed each team on a quarterly basis so we could keep calibrating, iterating, and fine-tuning. Our corporate card,

IO³, is a good example of a product that progressed internally from “seed stage startup” to “Series A” and beyond. It launched in September 2022, and today it is truly scaling, we have three large product teams working on it, and it is the most used corporate card among our customers.

Third, we set aggressive timelines for our initial launches — and made those deadlines visible across the entire company. This wasn’t arbitrary pressure. If we wanted to build multiple products simultaneously, we had to balance and maintain momentum around them — and prevent scope creep. We gave ourselves a forcing function.

Don’t compromise your core product

In my view, one risk of becoming a multi-product company is that it can come at the expense of what was once a great core product. I’m sure we’ve all felt it when a company starts expanding what they’re building, and the product you initially fell in love with degrades because it’s no longer getting the attention it deserves and needs. That is not an outcome we were willing to entertain at Mercury.

So the work to become multi-product was equally as important as strengthening our foundations. While we were building new products, we added things like support for more foreign currencies (we now support 40+ currencies for international transactions and wires), and we launched ACH authentication for added security. We introduced Smart Search so you could take instant actions like issuing a new card or transferring funds right from the search bar. We also doubled the size of our compliance team, integrated with a new partner bank, and continued improving our core infrastructure.

Keep building

The work we did in 2024 is part of our long-term vision for banking to do more. Practically, that means building a platform that integrates banking and financial software in order to enable ambitious businesses to run their finances all in one place on Mercury. I think, in five years, using financial software that isn’t part of your bank account might feel as outdated as the floppy disk or printing out driving directions.

“Mercury’s product is modern, intuitive, and has completely changed my expectations of what a bank account should do. As a scaling company, we need a banking partner that moves at the same speed we do and shares the same appreciation for building great products. The vision and craft they put into everything they do is so far beyond what traditional banks can provide,” said Paul Copplestone, co-founder and CEO of Supabase, an open-source developer platform.

We didn’t set out to build a bundle of products — we set out to create the most exceptional experience for banking. Because we believe that when businesses can manage their finances through a single platform and a powerful bank account, it supports their pursuit of building a successful company. That’s the future we’re building at Mercury.

Immad Akhund

Mercury CEO and co-founder