Live data from Hacker News

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

brex.com

71–80 of 350 posts

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

#71
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's totally understandable, for the small business segment. I was just saying that for a VC-backed tech startup, the lack of rewards is a huge turn-off, compared to some of the other options for spending available to us.

I don’t know of many banks that offer high reward debit cards. IMO Mercury has almost perfected the banking experience, and I am perfectly happy with that.

If I want a high-reward card I’ll get an Amex Platinum (a credit/charge card) and stick with Mercury as my bank.

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They've raised $1.5 billion in 12 rounds. I don't think this decision is due to a lack of funding; in fact, I think so much funding has significantly encouraged it. Unit economics and customer acquisition costs/lifetime total value become a lot more important when you're leveraged, doubly so with a recession looming.

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

#74
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any typical user choosing a big corporate bank over a credit union for a personal account is insane.

1. Zelle: all of the big banks have it. Credit unions are slower to adopt. 2. Mobile apps: big bank mobile apps are pretty great these days. 3. Credit cards: Bank of America rebates 2.625% for top customers. 4. Bill pay: the big bank bill pay integrations with vendors and ebills is better

Zelle should be avoided for almost every transaction. There is no fraud protection.

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

#75
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…

Not exactly the same but I did taxes one year on Credit Karma. A few years pass and I'm buying a house, lenders need tax returns. Credit Karma tax was sold off, support gets back to me after two days saying they can't help me at all getting the old return filed with them. Fuck this, never again.

Turns out it was easy to get the return from the IRS directly, but this turned me off from introducing "hip" tech into my financial life ever again.

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

#76
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

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.

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

#77

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…

I just wanted to say that I absolutely understand why you prefer users to use Plaid's identity product (the startup I work at does this as well), but I HATE that it's becoming the standard way to link checking accounts. Both from a data sharing perspective, and from a training users to enter login information into random forms perspective.

There has got to be a better way for us to accomplish this.

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

#78
post #17
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

I've founded many companies of many sizes, from 0 to 85 employees, over the last 25 years. I've used many business banks in many countries. (Wells, Citi, HSBC, ING, BoA, BNZ, OCBC, DBS, Wise, even private banks.) But I've never been so impressed and happy with my bank as I am with Mercury. Mercury continues to impress me, even though right now I'm a super-small-fry, their service, features, and attention are top-notc…

Wow, this is high praise coming from Derek Sivers.

This should immediately be on Mercury's landing page. :)

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

#79
post #15

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…

How do you distinguish between a tech startup and small business? Not to doxx anyone but I'm familiar enough with the financials of several businesses that would call themselves either depending on the context, and the only meaningful distinction I can think of is venture funding

bank account. tech startups have huge balances compared to lifetime

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For someone facing issues like this, you can often use another bank as an “intermediary” especially for personal accounts. Pull from your spendy bank using TD Ameritrade and then push it into Mercury.
Post reply on HN