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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?

#41
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

1000%, amazing startup banking partner. Ramp has also been amazing for expense management!

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

#42
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's great to maintain good enough unit economics to not have to pull stunts like this one, it's not necessarily always a plus from a customer perspective. 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…

This comment is so ironic. Love it.

Nice to see you taking feedback seriously.

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

#43
post #38

So customers have less than 2 months to find new banking partners, migrate their data, inform their partners about banking changes, etc... 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/o…

Chase is superior to WF and BoA both in tech and wait times in branch. I’ve lived in a handful of cities and used them all concurrently for years.

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.

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

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercury is awesome! Not sure if this is right venue for feedback, but if only you could offer ACH without Plaid (which feels like a huge invasion of privacy), it would be even more awesome. Wire transfers cost 20$ each, depositing by check feels like the 1990s and takes time to clear.

I assume they will support FedNow instant payments as they’re rolled out over the next 18-24 months. Those payments cost the financial services provider 5 cents per transaction up to between $100k and $500k (depending on configuration with the Fed). They settle immediately 24/7/365. Wires via FedWire will be reserved for amounts between $500k and $50M, which doesn’t sound like a $20 fee would be unreasonable for to a…

(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 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).

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

#47

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…

So current costs vs. revenue mean you can't service your current customer base? Specifically, the customer base that punched the growth numbers to achieve many millions in funding?

Charitably for Brex, if I am to guess the decision was not taken lightly, it possible the company cannot raise as much as it hoped, is running out of runway and has to cut costs and this is how its doing it - by downsizing, possibly layoffs in post-Aug

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

#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 bad I'd be willing to pay like $100/month to keep my account going.

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

#49
post #38

So customers have less than 2 months to find new banking partners, migrate their data, inform their partners about banking changes, etc... 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/o…

Does any of those traditional banks support remotely opening accounts for U.S. companies with non-U.S. owners (so without an SSN, only with EIN)?

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

#50
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is so ironic. Love it.

Nice to see you taking feedback seriously.

Okay. We don’t have a credit card right now, only debit.

For small businesses doing high reward credit cards is not a sustainable business. Which is why Brex is shutting them down.

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