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

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

#291

Post by dopeboy »

friendzis wrote: post #190
dopeboy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless that business is in crypto, in which case you'll freeze their account. This happened to us, which halted our payroll and hurt us. We had to scramble to find an alternative, which is now Brex. 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 do not think it is fair to complain about regulated banking when you yourself deliberately do stuff with crypto. Even more so when you mention that this particular institution was helpful with resolution out of the hole you dug yourself into. I don't want to start a debate on how crypto should be treated, but currently it is treated the way it is.

They should have refused to take me in as a customer.

Also, no hole was dug into. Their partner bank, Evolve, decided one day we were too risky of a business.

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

#292

Post by markdown »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #245
markdown wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Thank you for taking the time to clear that up. Sounds perfect.

Have a great weekend, sir.

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

#293

Post by sam0x17 »

sam0x17 wrote: post #48
pedrofranceschi wrote: post #10

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…

Edit: very disappointed to see Mercury denied my LLC as well. I guess they don't care about small businesses either?

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

#294

Post by duxup »

axg11 wrote: post #130
duxup wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they know they can’t offer a cost that makes sense / is competitive for those customers and would rather devote resources to a product that is competitive?

Why does the cost have to be competitive? Price it at a level that covers all costs. If the price is uncompetitive, 99% of users will not take it, however, that 1% that _really_ need to continue using Brex (for whatever tail reason) can continue to until they're ready to migrate.

Because you want to make a product that doesn't look silly / is worth all the effort to maintain it.

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 ...

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

#295

Post by reuven »

I've been using Brex for a few years. I didn't ask for much beyond an Internet bank into which Stripe and clients could deposit income, and from which I could make payments.

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.

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

#296

Post by Invictus0 »

blagie wrote: post #285
pedrofranceschi wrote: post #10

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…

Brex non-customer here. 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 s…

I can't stand comments like this, pointlessly berating the CEO when you're not even a client. This is a forum for startups: startups frequently pivot in their search for product market fit. What do you expect him to do, have the company go under to maintain an unprofitable business segment? Have a layoff to cut costs? Who would that benefit?

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.

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

#297

Post by jkeuhlen »

abofh wrote: post #201
MaxGabriel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm CTO of Mercury) 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…

So if I manage to catch your ear, can I ask if there are plans to allow earlier ACH (or even better, RTP) in the future? It's a mild annoyance that even scheduled ACH transactions don't go out until the last ACH window of the day - especially when I'm paying myself! :) It's definitely not a deal breaker, but it's the kind of thing I'd be willing to actually spend a few cents on to cover the transaction costs - earlie…

Hey abofh! I lead the engineering team responsible for payments at Mercury. We're definitely looking at adding better and faster payment rails in the future, but I think that your scheduled ACHs should go out in the first ACH window right now. It's possible that your receiving bank isn't posting them until later in the day, but we send those first thing in the morning when pre-scheduled. If you want to email me, I'm happy to double check that for you. jake at mercury dot com

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

#298

Post by reuven »

axg11 wrote: post #64
pedrofranceschi wrote: post #10

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…

Why do this rather than offer customers a chance to continue service at some higher cost?

100%. As a Brex customer who is getting kicked off, I would have paid $10/month to avoid the hassle I'll now deal with.

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

#299

Post by sam0x17 »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #52
pedrofranceschi wrote: post #10

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…

> 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…

Mercury rejected our LLC when we applied there yesterday so not sure where to go now (and no idea why we were rejected). Is there any reason not to go with Bluevine?

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

#300

Post by bradrydzewski »

pedrofranceschi wrote: post #10

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…

while on the topic of business focus, is Brex still in the restaurant business?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Multibillion-dollar...

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