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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?

#311

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…

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?

Hey, we looked into this. It looks like you registered in Rhode Island in 2016, but Rhode Island later revoked your business registration:

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.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hey, we looked into this. It looks like you registered in Rhode Island in 2016, but Rhode Island later revoked your business registration: 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 s…

Yeah we are waiting on accountant to finish taxes (which are on extension) for 2021 so we can submit and get a statement of good standing with RI so we can renew our registration. Mail forwarding failed to forward our annual statement document for 2021 so we won't be in good standing with RI until that happens. I got in touch with accountant today to see if they can escelate but they are still a few weeks out.

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

#313
We were one of the first Brex customers. Moved millions through them before deciding to move to another provider. They were always full of surprises, but not the good kind.

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.

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

#314

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…

I don’t understand why you’re still not laying out the new criteria for being a Brex customer? It’s a wasted opportunity. 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 establish…

After reading a few articles about how poorly Brex has handled this, I learned the Chief Communications Officer had 12 years of formative experience at Oracle (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-tillman-776a08/) and since worked at only large corps.

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.

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

#317
post #284

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…

As a startup CEO that uses Brex and hasn’t been kicked off I have to say that I’m strongly considering self-evicting. What a shitty way to handle this.

Same, I am presuming that they will be kicking off all startups at some point so may as well move now.

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

#318

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…

I don’t understand why you’re still not laying out the new criteria for being a Brex customer? It’s a wasted opportunity. 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 establish…

Brex founder here. Let me provide more context on what happened, and how this actually allows us to serve startups better.

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

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hey, we looked into this. It looks like you registered in Rhode Island in 2016, but Rhode Island later revoked your business registration: 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 s…

update: I have been in touch with RI. Should be a month or so and we will get a certificate.

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

#320

Remember Vimeo? They started as an alternative to Youtube, letting anybody upload. Then they decided to dump their small users and go for large ones. 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=...

> Then they decided to dump their small users and go for large ones 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.

LOL. The shitty version of Youtube has always been Youtube. If you were making an amateur video Youtube was plenty. If you were an auteur and wanted to be above the fray you hosted it on Vimeo. Sadly, Vimeo has gone the corporate video route while Youtube is leveraging Google.

Vimeo knew their target but sadly that market isn't large enough to pay the bills.

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