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Comment by parkaboy | Hacker News Reader

Not surprised by any of this. Feels like it comes from the top, culturally.

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.

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Indeed, Mercury has been phenomenal for us too. It's painful to use other banks now. How they've executed so quickly and competently in a tricky space is quite something to watch.

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.

Our unit economics are strong for all businesses, so we don't anticipate ever having to do something like this.

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.

Seconded, I love mercury.

Yuck. Brex comes across as risky, mercurial, and snobby rather than useful, professional, and reliable.

Does anyone else know about or use Silicon Valley Bank? How do they compare to Mercury?

We used SVB at my previous startup. Somewhat ironically, their UX is SUPER dated and a bit kludgy (been a year since I've checked, though) and their fees are high, BUT they're high touch and good to be in with strategically (especially when it comes to debt financing).

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.

SVB site UX has been "dated" since at least 2014. Good service tho.

I could care less about UX. If it looked like Larry Wall's personal site, but functioned well and was reliable (tech and relationships), I'd pick them every time.

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.

"functioned well and was reliable" _is_ UX. Having a pretty site might improve the user experience, but being broken and unreliable will have a far bigger impact.

If that's what most people thought of when the thought of UX, even here, then the phrase "the UX is dated" wouldn't mean anything. "The reliability is dated" is not a sentence that anyone says.

It's almost sort of endearing, but not actually. The fact that they use SMS-based 2FA (at least through 2021) is a travesty and a bit concerning, though.

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).

Lmao. That's some bikeshedding. Let me name other SMS 2FA "travesties" (regardless of TOTP support): Paypal, Box, Amazon, Citizen, Google, Zoom, Samsung, Signal, Lyft, (my bank), Coinbase, Discord, Ring, Twitter, ...

He said “(ONLY!) use SMS-based 2FA”.

Some of those sites support webauthn. TOTP is secure enough for the rest. SMS 2FA is only a problem when it’s the only option.

Why does offering an insecure authentication method stop being a problem when there are alternatives? It should not be offered.

When you can't reply to a comment it's usually because it's brand new, to prevent flame wars. If you click on the "timestamp" (where it says "0 minutes ago") you'll be able to reply there regardless of comment age.

Yes, well unfortunately 2FA and banking and investing doesn't seem to go well together in the US. These companies move at a glacial place.

Examples with huge market cap and no TOTP support (afaik): Vanguard ($6T+ managed), Chase Bank ($3T), and every botique investment firm I have dealt with.

I personally don't count "we email you a secret code" as 2FA. Do other people?? I mean, sure my email might be secured with real 2FA, but it's just my gut reaction that this isn't nearly as good.

Vanguard supports TOTP.

Wow, they must hide that well, I've been using them for years and never seen that. Time to go digging.

(Just a FWIW: Chase does have TOTP on offer with an RSA hardware dongle. It might be for just business customers, though)

You mean it's not optimised for a phone screen even when I'm using a pc so I can see a useful amount of information on one screen. And has actual options I need rather than looking good?

SVB's older UI is/was extremely dated, but their more recent SVB Go brand (connect.svb.com) is a huge step up.

I use SVB and agree- the UX is clunky. We added Teampay into the mix as the UX that our employees use. They love it and I love it too as the admin.

If you haven't seen it, we (Mercury) are also offering debt financing these days, starting with VC-backed companies: https://mercury.com/venture-debt

If you deposit checks, make sure SVB doesn't make it too much of a hassle. I don't know why but a prior employer banks at SVB and they have a real hard time getting my COBRA checks deposited. Sometimes, I'll have 4-5 months of COBRA checks deposited at once. I have a business account with plain old Chase and as long as the funds are in USD, I can deposit via a mobile app. Nobody really wants to deal with checks of course but if you do have to...

Yeah, this is scary AF because we are getting ready to raise as we get closer to the end of our runway and now I'm looking over my shoulder wondering if Brex is going to kick us out because we don't have enough cash in the bank.

Customer trust is hard to earn (I loved their product!) but so, so easy to lose.

We started using SVB when we expected to raise a sizable seed round which never happened. It's been over a year that we've been bootstrapping with them and we're quite happy with them. Support is great and I don't think they care that we're smaller and bootstrapping. Of course our needs aren't that big so we don't need a lot of support - but when we do the response is fast and personal.

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.

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