Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?
brex.com
brex.com
We've made the difficult decision to no longer offer services to the small business market.
Back in April we launched Empower, and we decided to put the full weight of Brex towards building the best global payments platform for tech startups and larger companies. With that, we realized we couldn't do a great job serving the small business community at the same time. This has been an incredibly difficult decision for me and the team, but we believe small businesses deserve a partner that is entirely focused on them.
We know how changes in financial services can be disruptive – especially in a moment like now. We're doing all we can, and working with other financial service providers to make this transition as smooth as possible.
Whoever approved this communication squandered a chance to reframe what Brex is now about. Had the announcement said something like, “what’s the new criteria? $1m deposits … blah blah blah … we actually lose money on smaller customers … yadda yadda … it’s not sustainable”, you could have established yourself as transparent with a tough choice that you had to make. People can understand that.
Instead you post platitudes like “We’ve made the difficult decision” with nothing substantive and are establishing Brex as cagey, opaque, and unnecessarily defensive. Not a good look for your banks existing customers.
Now you’ve got a PR mess on your hands to clean up. Please consider a transparent postmortem on this blunder instead of doubling down on more corp PR speak.
That would explain the heavy corp speak and complete lack of transparency. I don't expect them to budge or concede on any of this since the playbook is double-down, deny, and let it blow over. Blah.
I'm moving my funds out of Brex and will never bank with them. If you're in the same boat transferring founds out, be sure to leave a penny in your account and take a look at:
- https://www.mercury.com for small business banking. This is who I bank with now for small accounts and it works great. My only complaint is they don't yet have a credit card product, which makes purchasing online slightly riskier since debit disputes are harder than credit.
- https://www.airbase.com if you're looking for Brex Empower that doesn't have a track record of pulling the rug out from under people and need to control spend, etc. I've had experience running millions of dollars through Airbase and its great. No complaints. They're also great at responding to the needs of users.
The idea that this doesn't require face to face handling simply chills me to the bone. Is this how we're preparing for the worst economy in fifty years?
edit: PR used to begin with word of mouth. Just because we're online doesn't mean you can sh*post excuses and be done.
In a bygone era I'd have suggested that shame came into it.
It's because you can't convince anyone you're competent whilst acting up like this.
In 2018, we launched Brex and started serving the fastest growing companies out there (DoorDash, Airtable, ScaleAI, Flexport, etc). As we expanded in 2020, we decided to start serving small businesses. We onboarded tens of thousands of traditional brick-and-mortar companies to Brex, along with startups. Over time, we realized that our startup customers were growing very fast, and needed BrexHQ to scale with them, but Brex didn’t work as well for larger companies.
Last year, we decided to go back to our core, and shift our resources to make sure startups could scale with Brex. However, we still had tens of thousands of small businesses with very different needs from fast-growing companies. By spreading ourselves too thin, we couldn’t serve either small businesses or startups well:
1) Small businesses didn’t get the products they needed (e.g. working capital solutions). 2) We had to degrade the white-glove level of service we offered to startups, in order to scale to tens of thousands of customers.
As we continued to scale Brex to serve startups (such as 70% of YC companies!), we realized we couldn’t do a great job serving small businesses at the same time. This led us to the painful decision to stop serving traditional small businesses. We decided to draw the line of who’s eligible as any customer who received any investment (accelerator, angel, VC, web3 token, etc).
This has been an incredibly difficult decision for the team, but it allows us to deeply focus on serving startups better. I wish we had been more transparent with the startup community about what this means to them – apologies for all the confusion.
If you believe we made a mistake offboarding you, please let us know at reopen@brex.com
I know you won't do anything about this, but you should seriously reconsider your Chief Communications Officer if you're serious about targeting startups (reasons at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780900). Assuming they're advising the customer communication for this strategy shift, you're getting terrible advice as evident by the poor response here and in the press. This was a huge opportunity to reframe Brex as being all about funded startups. Instead Brex is coming across as arrogant with no concern for customers unless they have boatloads of money and fit into the strategy. It's very unbecoming to startups and sounds like how Oracle would communicate to the world.
Now, I'm not so sure. And I'll definitely have to caveat it with this event. Was that worth it?
Word of mouth is highly influential for how startup founders pick products and I feel like this will be super damaging for your brand.
The biggest thing for us would be if you could support Plaid's Identity product by returning names and emails when someone links a Brex account with Plaid.
When someone links an account using Plaid, having this data available means we can compare that to the names/emails we have on file and have verified. If it's a match, this makes it _dramatically_ less likely someone is trying to commit ACH fraud against a Brex customer.
This makes it safer for us to offer higher ACH pull limits to that customer. Even for customers who never switch away from Brex, this would significantly increase protection from ACH fraud.
- Max T, CTO Mercury
There has got to be a better way for us to accomplish this.
Uber is an example of this (taxis had issues in Europe/Australia as well, but by far not as problematic)
One path forward is Oauth, which several major institutions use on Plaid (Capital One, Wells, Chase are ones I know of).
This definitely solves “entering login information into random forms”.
I’m pretty sure I have seen these institutions offer you some control over what data you share when you link, but it was minimal control, and didn’t work well. Ideally that would be more fleshed out.
You’d still be sharing balance and transaction data with Plaid though, that part isn’t solved by Oauth. I think to solve that you need to have a European style standard banking API that makes direct bank-to-bank data sharing tenable?
The US needs an open banking law. This should not be an optional feature for banks to offer. It should be an absolute requirement.
I think it's insane to enter your credentials into Plaid. Almost every banking agreement I've ever seen disclaims liability if your account is breached because you shared your password. So, if you share your password with Plaid, and Plaid is breached, and someone uses your banking credentials to drain your account, I think a bank could wash their hands of it and walk away in that situation.
I'm sure the Plaid engineers are great, and that their data is stored securely (and maybe they don't store the password at all in there systems). But I'm not willing to bet my entire bank account on them being perfect.
Why can’t a Mercury wire or ach successfully clear to Circle?
As a Mercury customer what I know is that not a single one I’ve tried has worked resulting in days locked funds.
This is (as far as I understand) wrong. Fortunately it usually doesn’t break anything, but Circle is more strict about this saying the business name.
We have a new partner bank we just launched where we have full control of the ACH stack, where we’ve resolved this. Also trying to fix the issue with the existing partner.
Caveat that I didn’t check this answer with anyone, since it’s early.
http://business.sos.ri.gov/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSearchRedi...
https://opencorporates.com/filings/1091852658
Does this sound correct to you / if so can you remedy it with Rhode Island? (edit: our onboarding team says you specifically want a Certificate of Good Standing from the state)
That said, this should have been communicated as a clear rejection reason—we'll work on that.
1) If I were doing due diligence on a vendor, and ran across something like this, I wouldn't buy from them. It's unlikely to come up (I've never done due diligence on a CEO), but if I learned a CEO had pulled a stunt like this, I wouldn't buy from a new company.
2) Actions like this bias my judgements to the entire buy vs. build decision, and the SaaS space. My experience is that each time a service provider pulls something like this, the cost is higher than any net benefit from having worked with that provider.
There are exceptions. There are vendors with long track-records of stability. I happily use AWS, and would happily use Azure. But I don't do business with Google because of a history of stunts like this (several affecting me), and I avoid small startups for anything business-critical for the same reason.
In finance, stability is especially key.
In the same way as firing employees impacts the morale of existing and potential employees, firing customers does the same.
Guess what: if every time a CEO writes a comment on this forum, angry-for-no-reason people show up to hurl vitriol at them, then eventually they will stop showing up to write comments. Stop it.
This is criticism and advice. It is not this forum's job to tell people that their ideas are good and their business models are sound when they arent. It seems like the claim is that it is a worse idea than you think to fire your customers.
The flip side is that if you are evaluating vendors, this kind of stability is worth looking at:
- Do they have a track record of customer-disruptive pivots?
- Are they structured (e.g. have revenues or funding) to be around for the long-term? Or might they disappear overnight, taking your business down with them?
- Are you being subsidized for growth? Do you expect for this to flip to being a cash cow at some point?
The wisdom when I was younger was "No one got fired for buying IBM." It annoyed me at the time, but having done a few ventures, I understand that wisdom now. It takes 10-20 years for a unicorn to exit. If you have a dozen vendors who are positioned such that a pivot on their side can cripple your business, and those vendors have a mean time between such pivots of 5 years, you won't last long.
With both employees and vendors, a good thing to look at is history of value-creation. If an employee created value everywhere they've worked, they're probably a good hire. If they've burned value at each place they've been, they're probably a bad hire.
Source: We're a neobank too (and we use Brex cards for company purchases)
they probably would still lose money off you even if you paid $100 a month, given what you've described.
You hear that? That's the sound of my eyes rolling. Dude, stop saying cringe shit like "we made the difficult decision." You dumped your least profitable customers in the gutter.
> We know how changes in financial services can be disruptive – especially in a moment like now. We're doing all we can
Like giving people two months notice?
Seems like a perfectly calculated move: be a jerk to a small number of small-fry customers so the rest of your small-fry customers freak out and leave on their own accord and have much less negative stuff to say about you.
You're going to kick out some people that end up succeeding big. They will never forget what you did to them, and they will go out of their way to tell others about it.
You should have just changed the bennies for accounts under a certain size, instead of booting accounts and making even a small number of people enemies.
Not to doxx anyone but I'm familiar enough with the financials of several businesses that would call themselves either depending on the context, and the only meaningful distinction I can think of is venture funding
In contemporary usage "tech startup" usually means an early stage company expected to relatively quickly grow their money flows and have high opex-to-capex and incoming-to-outgoing transaction ratios.
If the estimated total net profit % per user is low single digits, keep them like "white elephants" or move them somewhere else where they can be serviced with continuity.
Pulling the rug out from under customers with little or no warning is a terrible practice.
Would be great if you could send an email to _all_ customers, including the ones who weren't affected as a reassurance, so we could either rest in peace or get the migration started ASAP.
Communicating such business impactful decision through a pop-up is ridiculous
Older banks may have lots of problems, but they usually don't get those fundamentals wrong
> Brex makes it easy for founders, finance teams, and employees to spend smart, grow fast, and enjoy the ride.
Maybe you should pivot your (customer) marketing material as well as your pitch deck.
I’m guessing they were just chasing vanity metrics for a funding round
And if the answer is no, then does that mean if we're not growing fast enough / raising money fast enough, you will kick us out?
Please clarify.
Though I still wonder if they considered just closing off to new customers instead of closing accounts of existing ones, since the fact that the latter would blow up in a nasty PR nightmare like this and do massive damage to their brand was pretty foreseeable.
Except, you know, not kick people off your platform.
Having an noncompetitive product means fewer and fewer customers so the cost keeps going up per customer.
It also looks really bad. I know when I'm shopping around if I see sticker shock for some service even when it isn't exactly what I"m buying that is a big turn off for me as I assume that's how they price things ...
Love these strategy discussions
You have made decisions capable of inflicting tremendous pain on entirely innocent people eg employees.
How are you to be believed that you will not randomly hurt more people?
Buddy this isn't PR this is proving you're not a dangerous child entirely before you defend your job.
People don't change banks very often - a lot of banks offer child and student accounts because they know a decent % of people who bank with them at age 15 will bank with them at age 35.
Perhaps their intention was to get in early at 3-person companies that were on their way to becoming 300-employee companies; but they actually found a bunch of 3-person businesses like barber shops and food trucks signed up.
The "larger companies" part is surprising to me. I would have expected that larger companies have already figured out good ways to handle global payments. Global commerce by large companies has been common for decades and so I'd expect there would be large, efficient, well established services supporting that.
It is smaller companies being able to participate in global commerce that is still fairly new, and I'd expect that many of the older global payment services that served the larger company's global payment needs aren't designed to scale down for smaller customers.
Thus I'd expect that global payments for smaller companies is where the opportunity lies.
Good riddance. I dodged a bullet.
Could you elaborate on the “incredibly difficult” phrase? What pain did you go through to make this decision? Do you mean this is a risky move for you?
Bankers be hankering for more bankering.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Multibillion-dollar...
We’ve put $millions through Brex cash/cards and will almost certainly leave after reading this. This doesn’t affect us (I think?) but that they’d do something like this in this way is a breach of trust that signals bigger problems down the line. What is “Empower” and why would I believe they won’t sunset the current Brex offering to push some upmarket sales nonsense on us as it that new thing becomes the focus?
We had kind of outgrown Brex anyway, but this is sad to see. What really irks me here is that I know my first company, a bootstrapped e-commerce thing that was a healthy “small business” would have been axed by this, but the current one is big enough that they wouldn’t want to lose us. Just doesn’t sit right with me.
I appreciate how tough this decision probably was, but I hope they properly modeled who else they’d lose via loss of faith, like us.
I don't know Brex but looking around their website they seem to be a fintech company but not a bank (they don't seem to have a licence)
Our “real” bank has such a clunky interface that we started using Brex cash because it was a little easier, and over time drifted more to that account.
I had a terrible experience "onboarding" with Brex last year. They actually "approved" my bootstrapped startup and sent me a physical card only to rescind it a shortly thereafter, because--even though we met the funding minimum--it wasn't "professionally invested" on further review. Bootstrapping apparently required a $1MM minimum.
Here's what they told me:
"While being professionally invested is not a requirement for the Brex card with monthly payments, without professional investment, the minimum cash balance requirement shown in connected accounts is $1mm. If you're able to provide proof of XXXXX's professional investment, the minimum cash balance requirement shown in connected accounts is $50k."
Left a really bitter taste in my mouth. Won't ever use them.
Currently banking with Mercury and love it BTW.
But the thought of them pulling a Brex-like move might now keep me awake at night... hopefully they would just add a monthly fee on before reaching that point.
Banking is our primary focus, not an add-on feature, and we invest significantly on the product teams that enable strong unit economics in banking for the long run, like partner integrations, support experience, and onboarding/risk.
Does anyone else know about or use Silicon Valley Bank? How do they compare to Mercury?
I don't know if I'd suggest them early on when bootstrapped, but definitely worth a gander once larger or VC-backed.
Mercury's UX is sexy AF and enjoyable to use. They did have an internal screw-up with our initial account setup due to a mix-up with their partner bank (Evolve Bank & Trust), but their customer support is top notch and got it resolved quickly. They also have some nice promotional deals. In comparison to SVB, though, they're not nearly as high touch and also don't have physical locations.
If it ain't broke, don't break it. ;)
PS: SVB's site has always looked a bit behind the times like that they never cared enough to make it look glitzy because functionality and communication were considered first. Slick websites also give a captological impression of overcompensating, so perhaps decompensating is an important contrary corollary for basic utility services.
Edit: since I can't reply to response below (I think due to thread depth topping out). To clarify: they ONLY support SMS-based 2FA. No TOTP. Sure, other services offer SMS as well, but you wouldn't want to use that for securing any serious amounts of money (millions of dollars).
My read on SVBs strategy is - if there is potential for this company to become large VC then it's better to be kind to them even before that point.
Customer trust is hard to earn (I loved their product!) but so, so easy to lose.
Vimeo is publicly held, so we can see how this worked out.[1] Price one year ago, at the peak, $49. Price today, $6.54.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/fi-c26vvh?ocid=...
If they didn't, they'd stay "shitty youtube" and lose. They decided to differentiate themselves to have a chance at finding their target market.
Vimeo knew their target but sadly that market isn't large enough to pay the bills.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/financials/fi-c...
It's either flat or increasing. Where are you seeing declining income?
If they had said, "Below a certain balance, we'll need to charge you a fee," I likely would have paid it. The annoyance factor of switching banks, payment from my various vendors, etc., is not small.
Instead, I got a completely out-of-the-blue e-mail telling me that I have about two months to switch banks, and that there's nothing to talk about.
I'll echo those who wrote that if this was, as the CEO wrote, "an incredibly difficult decision for me and the team," it should have been given more thought than a "We're kicking you off -- good riddance" message.
I'm disappointed as a customer. But I'm also disappointed as a person in the tech space, where such poor behavior toward your customers is considered acceptable. More transparency and empathy could have turned this from an infuriating PR mess to a frustrating-but-understandable pivot by a fintech startup.
> Don't charge it, Brex it.
The point I'm trying to make here is that it's just not a topic that you can have a casual opinion on. Against that backdrop, using the term as a whimsical joke feels so profoundly distasteful that a lot of people here would probably ignore the business entirely.
You should definitely check us out https://www.rebanknow.com/ if you're looking for an alternative. We cater specifically for small businesses and we're ready to help you switch over.
If you are looking for an alternative, we are 100% committed to businesses of all sizes:
A) the smallest businesses can be the next big startup
B) We maintain strong unit economics at all sizes.
We setup a landing page to get these customers onboarded quickly: https://mercury.com/partner/brex
I've used many business banks in many countries. (Wells, Citi, HSBC, ING, BoA, BNZ, OCBC, DBS, Wise, even private banks.)
But I've never been so impressed and happy with my bank as I am with Mercury.
Mercury continues to impress me, even though right now I'm a super-small-fry, their service, features, and attention are top-notch. I love them. I'm a Mercury fan.
This should immediately be on Mercury's landing page. :)
I'm not sure but I think PG has talked about this strategy.
If the product mostly does what it should then support costs shouldn’t be crazy.
(Assuming that’s the part that you think is unscalable for us)
One of the huge benefits of not hacking your product together as fast as humanly possible!
To Mercury's credit, their staff was responsive the entire time in helping us transition. But the fact that they couldn't give an ETA on when things would resolve with their partner bank was distressing for us.
I don't want to start a debate on how crypto should be treated, but currently it is treated the way it is.
Also, no hole was dug into. Their partner bank, Evolve, decided one day we were too risky of a business.
It's...their business?
Also, responsive ≠ helpful.
Incredibly easy setup, great UI/UX and no nickeling and diming with fees of any kind. Makes me wonder what are your unit economics like as you obviously will be making losses from the very smallest of customers?
Edit: I didn’t even know Mercury doesn’t charge for sending wires. As a customer, I’m delighted.
To clarify, when rawtxapp said "Wire transfers cost 20$ each", they probably mean wiring _to_ Mercury from their bank costs $20. Mercury doesn't charge for sending wires.
The reason they're mentioning the 3rd party bank fees is they'd prefer to use ACH pull to have Mercury take the money directly from their existing bank account (similar to how your gym or electric company might do). We do offer this, but only if you use a service called Plaid to link your third party bank account.
This involves typing your bank's username/password/2FA into a Plaid iframe on our website, which confirms it with the third party bank. If you've used Venmo, that's using Plaid under the hood to link your bank account.
Ok, all that said, my question for rawtxapp: are you mostly asking for us to verify 3rd party bank accounts via microdeposit instead? I agree it's less privacy invasive, but, definitely pretty slow and 1990s like you said about checks. I'm not sure of the security either.
I'm somewhat hoping it's less of an issue as more banks move to doing OAuth in Plaid, instead of sharing passwords. Capital One, Wells Fargo, and Chase do this now (we should really move to doing it too).
Edit: already have a landing page up for migrating Brex folks, chef kiss
Comparing Mercury and Brex/Ramp specifically, Mercury is notably missing rewards on transactions, while Ramp has unlimited 1.5% cashback, and Brex has a bunch of multipliers ranging from 7x to 1x points.
If I have access to all of the options above, it would be financially irresponsible for me to spend through Mercury.
Would like to see Mercury get more competitive here even at the cost of less cushy unit economics.
EDIT: Some of the replies here seem to think Brex is shutting down entirely? Please read the actual article and the founder response above. They're only shutting down operations for small businesses, presumably because that's the only segment that doesn't have sustainable unit economics. % rewards on spend from interchange revenue has been around for decades. The model works, given the right set of customers and credit risk profiles.
For small businesses doing high reward credit cards is not a sustainable business. Which is why Brex is shutting them down.
I was just saying that for a VC-backed tech startup, the lack of rewards is a huge turn-off, compared to some of the other options for spending available to us.
If I want a high-reward card I’ll get an Amex Platinum (a credit/charge card) and stick with Mercury as my bank.
I would just prefer to have my banking and spending in 1 place, and if I did that with Mercury, I'd be sacrificing 1%+ rewards, which I would not consider a financially responsible option when Brex exists and has a good enough banking experience.
Wouldn't it be nicer for everybody if there were more options that had both a great banking experience and credit-level rewards that all competed for our business? That's all I was trying to encourage with my feedback, but the fanboyism in this thread has proved to be too strong for that message to get through.
I see your point, but I am not of that opinion.
Appreciate the feedback.
Sooo... The model only works if you carefully cherry pick the customers?
sounds like Brex has been losing money on unit economics while making it up on volume, and now with VC money tightening ...
Wrt. small business vs. startup - i'd guess that any company older than 3-5 years which hasn't become big enough (in spending or revenue) and not showing fast growth can be considered a small business :)
Startups usually have tons of cash in the bank to underwrite against, which made them actually very safe to lend to, unintuitively enough (that underwriting model was Brex's original innovation, remember?).
Whereas small businesses usually don't, but still need a reasonable credit limit to spend with, so they end up having to underwrite using traditional data sources like credit scores and whatnot, and they probably haven't been able to develop a sophisticated enough model quickly enough to curb losses, and the recession certainly isn't going to make things any easier.
So, anticipating further accelerated credit losses down the line, this is them throwing in the towel on that whole experiment.
@immad, if you verify Mercury's listing on SaaSHub, I can organize featuring it on the newsletter. Cheers!
(Disclaimer: I work for Mercury!)
I was happily using Brex until now.
Any suggestions to speed up the waiting?
This is one reason why I'm avoiding all fintech/startup/neo banks in the future. My most solid experience was with a top 5 US bank. They have a shitty customer service and a plethora of offers; but my direct deposits go faster, I don't get pestered over 5 figures amount going in/out because AML and they were able to accommodate some particular needs (that no neo fintech will do, since they lump all customers into one basket).
If anyone wants to bank in the future (both for personal/business), here are the banks I'd suggest: Citi, Chase, BoA and WellsFargo.
How good is the online/mobile app access for US Bank?
If you’re doing any kind of business you want to be at US Bank, Farmers & Merchants, East West Bank, etc. They are better about loan products.
Turns out it was easy to get the return from the IRS directly, but this turned me off from introducing "hip" tech into my financial life ever again.
- I've moved to 12 in 15 years across 3 countries and 8 states. Credit unions are terrible for this.
- The non-profit credit union I used for my car loan was quite possibly the worst and most painful technology interfacing experience I've ever encountered.
- There are all sorts of out of state and international benefits by using a national provider - for example, I regularly send international wires for an international STR property I own.
- You simply can't beat big banks for their CC rewards.
FYI - I've used BoA, WF and Chase blows them all out of the water.
So, no, it's totally not insane.
My credit union's app does everything I need it to. Mobile check cash, check balances/see activity, lock or limit my debit card ($ amount, transaction type, location, etc.)
One has great internet banking, remote check deposit, Zelle, and I can always talk to a real human on the phone when I need to. (Bonus: hearing my hometown accent). Nearly every financial product I need is there. And, I trust them, with cause.
My other CUs have fewer services and would not function as primary banks.
A couple months down the line I had a bureaucratic hiccup with some tax office documents and it was SO MUCH nicer to be able to walk into a bank office and speak to a person and get it all sorted out on the spot, instead of arguing with some online live chat agent to be escalated to the right place.
When I lived in the UK I used Monzo there (another online-only, app-only (!) neo bank). This seemed like a good idea at the time - until I started needing to do things that traditional banks are much better at (such as international transfers). What really hit me here is that I at some point considered doing a smartphone detox, and realised that my smartphone was the only way to fully access my personal account there. Bad idea, never again ...
(There's some symmetry between this and ordering products online for me, btw. If I can go to a physical store and look at a thing before buying I will prefer this over ordering online and potentially dealing with returns, delivery issues etc. almost 100% of the time)
Completely can align with the thought that is things do not work, exit the space or pivot, but keep moving on to better strategies and execution. Do the needed.
We feel confident in delivering a best-in-class service to customers who meet any of the following criteria:
Received an equity investment of any amount (accelerator, angel, VC or web3 token);
More than $1 million a year in revenue;
More than 50 employees;
More than $500k in cash;
Tech startups who are on a path to meeting the criteria above, and are referred by an existing customer or partner.
That said, the tone of this letter was far, far better than the previous one. And it gave some clear criteria for who is in, and who is not.
So they handled this poorly, but they've at least made some effort to make things less bad.
My experience has been really good though and the whole process has been really painless. I recommend them too.
(CTO at Mercury)
Could you clarify the minimum requirements for being a Mercury customer?
On your home page, you say you are not a bank. From what I can tell, you seem to be a wrapper around a bank(s) (Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®). Does that mean signing up with you gives me an account with those banks, or do I still have to sign up with those banks independently in order to use your service?
I'm sorry if this seems like a stupid question, but it isn't apparent to me from a quick scan of your website.
EDIT: Last question... if your customers aren't required to establish a direct relationship with your underlying banks, how do you handle KYC? Would I need to fly to the US to get this started, or would a zoom session plus all the relevant ID's be enough?
I get that corporations couldn't care less about us as people but the phrase "we appreciate your business" and its variations will forever rub me the wrong way.
Seriously though "appreciate your business" is the "thoughts and prayers" of crappy customer service.
Do the people writing these genuinely see them as statements people will appreciate? Or is the motivation to burn bridges and ensure that customers they no longer want will be offended?
I wish that people dropped the act and were more straightforward. It's notmlike anyone buys this anyway.
If you're going to service startups as Brex, 80-90% are going to just cost you money and then disappear when they fail. Not sure how they're going to turn a profit this way even if a small percentage get big.
The practice is often that you use technology to provide a half-arsed subset of the services that a traditional bank does, but you don't have a risk department so when there's a downturn in the market it turns out you're providing services to all the people a traditional bank didn't want to deal with for good reason.
After all it did work for PayPal.
While they since fixed many of the quirks and improved the overall service significantly, their priorities were always misaligned with the ones of their customers. The cherry on the top for me was when they purchased a restaurant in SF instead of fixing glaring bugs.
I really liked the dynamic credit card generator, and Brex Travel was luxurious...
Also, I'm curious what the new cut off is, and who their new customers are. Is the new downturn causing their "strategy change"?
I think one thing being lost in translation here is that Brex considers small businesses to be different from startups, and it's an important distinction internally that is likely getting lost externally.
For example, we just acquired Pry to help with founders at small startups figure out financial projections and needs. If you're an early stage funded startup, Brex is probably still a good fit.
The policy cited here is more about no longer being a good fit for "traditional" small businesses.
Lawncare business = not a startup.
Like Uber, but for lawncare = startup.
Small business never will go profitable for them so they don’t want to waste time on it.
Think “enterprise”.
Of which you, nor anyone else here, can clearly define.
Hilarious, indeed.
I really hope Mercury doesn't pull the same stunt.
We're in the S22 batch and offer payment flexibility beyond corporate cards in the UK and now US - so if you want to spread out your large payments from 3 to 12 months and avoid default dead (or offer this to your customers so you get paid upfront) would love to chat.
Meanwhile would love SVB vs Brex vs Ramp vs Mercury advice for my US banking!
We're in the S22 batch and offer payment flexibility beyond corporate cards in the UK and now US - so if you want to spread out your large payments from 3 to 12 months and avoid default dead (or offer this to your customers so you get paid upfront) would love to chat.
Meanwhile would love SVB vs Brex vs Ramp advice for my US banking!
We offer payment flexibility beyond corporate cards in the UK and now US - so if you want to spread out your large payments from 3 to 12 months and avoid default dead (or offer this to your customers so you get paid upfront) would love to chat.
Meanwhile would love SVB vs Brex vs Ramp vs Mercury advice for my US banking!
As others have mentioned some of the “go-to” options like SVB have terrible (digital) services.
I’m biased but Grasshopper Bank has one of the best digital experiences, and is an actual FDIC insured bank. They are also much cheaper once you start needing services like Letters of Credits, etc.
I've been using LMCU for a couple decades living away from any branches. I use the app for cashing checks and there are ATM's in their free network at all the Speedway gas stations and CVS's around me.
We used Mercury and it was very easy
or email me: jeremy [at] relayfi[dot] com
Bad luck I didn’t pick Mercury in the coin flip between them.
jeremy [at] relayfi[dot] com
Check out: https://every.io/
> Brex is constantly evolving our business, and after changes to our strategy, we are less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers. The following sections will provide you with more context for your next steps.
terrible communication. it's we need ______ so you should deal with _____. that is not empathy
I've never heard of Brex before this but this is really bad marketing for them. Don't put your faith and one of the most important aspects of your business in these "hip" fintech companies hands. They will not feel any shame pulling the rug out from under you.