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Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

brex.com

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Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#241

Brex founder here. 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 diff…

> This has been an incredibly difficult decision for me

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?

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#242
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s deliberate. The choices are 1) say something true that will make you look bad, 2) say something untrue that might bite you in the ass later, and 3) write ambiguous waffle that explains nothing and commits you to nothing. PR and legal will tell you to choose 3 every time.

for those that didn't click, pasting verbatim > 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

The corollary of “the customer is always right” is “fire any wrong customers”.

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#243
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're doing all we can, and working with other financial service providers to make this transition as smooth as possible. 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…

Question for ya, 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.

Iirc, with our current partner bank Evolve + technology provider Synapse, ACHs and wires have “Synapse” as the sender name on a certain field, instead of your business name.

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.

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much in fees do you have to pay? In a similar boat

Nothing. I only use ACHs and my debit card though, no wire transfers so I can’t comment on that. Everything has been free for me.

Wires are also free, in case you ever need them :)

(CTO at Mercury)

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do, this is a very common customer profile for us

That's great to know. While I have you here, could you just clear one thing up for me? 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 sor…

> 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?

Neither. The funds are held by those banks, but you won’t ever deal with them directly nor have any login to them

> 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?

You just sign up online and provide documents. No zoom sessions.

If you have the relevant documents signing up should take ~15 minutes

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#246
post #14

CEO of Mercury here. 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

mercury is 10/10, happy customer here.

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#248
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question for ya, 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.

Iirc, with our current partner bank Evolve + technology provider Synapse, ACHs and wires have “Synapse” as the sender name on a certain field, instead of your business name. 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 w…

We use to be with Synapse and Evolve too - have thankfully moved on ;) We went through the same pain with Synapse that it's their name and not the customer's name on the wire. I thought at Mercury's scale you could get them to change this by now.

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#249
post #48

Brex founder here. 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 diff…

AKA they lose money on smaller customers to customer support requests and most likely wire transfer fees since they offer wire tranfers for free. They almost definitely lost money on my LLC I bet they only made $5 in interest after a year and probably spent $100s investigating my various customer support requests. Plus I made several thousand off of their rewards program. So yeah, bummer, but it makes sense. It's too…

They make money on the interchange too. When you're spending on your card, they're making money. At least for their credit cards, no idea how their cash/banking product works.

Source: We're a neobank too (and we use Brex cards for company purchases)

Re: Why am I no longer qualified to be a Brex customer?

#250

The title of this page says “why” but there is exactly zero on this page which explains why. There’s half of one sentence that introduces what (“we are less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers”) but even that is dressed up to the max. This is a poster child in what everyone hates about corporate communication: entirely opaque, misleading word salad. Do better.

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