Immad Akhund of Mercury talks about building a fintech for startups

Immad Akhund of Mercury - Podcast Transcript

Scott:	Hey, it’s Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. Today, we’re brought to you by the Kruze Consulting FP&A team. Help your startup get its budgets in order, get it approved at your first board meeting in 2020 and start executing. You got into this business to build a company. Let us help you get the numbers that can talk to your VCs and help you start hiring right away, start executing and start hitting your milestones. The Kruze FP&A team is there. Healy Jones, Blake, Kevin, they’re there to help you build an awesome financial model that you can use and that speaks to your board. Now, onto another awesome podcast.
Music:	(singing). It’s Kruze Consulting, Founders and Friends with your host. Scotty Orn.
Scott:	Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting, and my very special guest is Immad Akhund of Mercury Bank. Welcome, Immad.
Immad:	Thanks for having me.
Scott:	You’ve raised money, you’ve been building Mercury for a while, but we’ve actually been seeing at Kruze Consulting a lot of Mercury clients coming over to Kruze. So, we’re super excited to have you on the podcast.
Immad:	Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Scott:	The dogs are eating the dog food. It’s working.
Immad:	Well, you must be doing great things, too, for our customers we’re giving to you.
Scott:	Thank you. Thank you. So, maybe start off by just retracing your career a little bit and how you had the idea for Mercury.
Immad:	Yeah. I’ve been doing startups for, I think, 13 years, so Mercury’s actually my fourth company. My previous startup was called Heyzap, which did a bunch of things, eventually did mobile developer tools. All throughout my entrepreneurial career, I’ve just always been frustrated by banks. Yeah. I really enjoy making and using great products, and especially in business, a lot of things have improved in the last 10 years, whether it’s Slack or Gusto for payroll, and banking has just been kind of in the Stone Ages. So, I had this idea for Mercury, I think, in, like, 2014. I was just … I won’t drop names, but I was using the most well-known Silicon Valley-centric bank and I was just always frustrated. Customer support wasn’t very good. The product sucked. You’d go back more than three months, you can’t find any transactions. I just couldn’t understand why it was that bad.
Scott:	Yeah. Especially a bank that’s in the heart of Silicon Valley, right? Like why-
Immad:	Yeah. I mean, everyone uses these. So, that was frustration number one for us. Frustration number two was we were a marketplace, so we’d receive a bunch of money, and at the end of the month, we’d pay out, like, 600 developers. Then, we had this extremely manual process, I’m sure you’ve dealt with, kind of marketplace clients where every day, someone had to log into the bank to see who had paid us and then copy/paste this number into the back end. Then, at the end of the month, we do some stuff through PayPal, which was automated, but when it came to wires, international wires, it was all kind of manually typing in numbers and these huge admin pages.
Scott:	I know. I was going to say, I couldn’t agree more. I’m the CFO for Kruze Consulting. I’m the one who has to do those wires and horrendous stuff. It’s crazy.
Immad:	Yeah.
Scott:	So, yes.
Immad:	Yeah. So, that was kind of part two. I just couldn’t understand why banks couldn’t provide an API. It just seemed like an obvious thing that you should be able to do through your bank. Then, part three, again, I’m sure you can relate to this, we’d raised a bunch of money, we’d raised eight million at our previous company, but it was over eight years, and we were profitable for the last kind of three or four years, but we’re always kind of cash-strapped, especially being a marketplace. We’d receive, like, $2 million, but we’d have to pay out $1.4 million. So, there was always this cash crunch. Just understanding what’s the financial position of the company in real-time was super hard, and it mattered to us. So, yeah, we’d be waiting for this kind of spreadsheet from the bookkeeper at the end of the month, plus, like, 16 days. I remember, many months, I’d have no idea what happened last month in terms of the costs and in terms of these key metrics. Then, things like the AWS bill would go up from 50K to 80K. No one would notice for three months. I’m sure if we use Kruze Consulting, we would always notice that kind of stuff…
Scott:	You’d actually have a note in your financial package about that.
Immad:	Yeah, exactly.
Scott:	But yes. Yes. It’s a common point.
Immad:	I was, “All of this stuff is flowing through the bank. Why can’t the bank give me any kind of insight into what my finances are.”
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	So, those are kind of like the three parts of the problem. After we sold our company, I wanted to do something meaty that I could do for 10 years. I kind of love entrepreneurs and talking to entrepreneurs. I’ve also invested in a bunch of companies, so I was kind of excited about finally making a product that I wanted to use, that I would feel that other entrepreneurs could get a lot of value from. So, in 2017, we kind of started. Then, it’s complicated building a bank, so it took us kind of a year and a half, almost two years, to get the first version, fully live in April this year, and it’s gone very well, thankfully, and we raised another kind of $20 million Series A a couple of months ago.
Scott:	Yeah. You guys are … Like I said, I can see the traction happening, and it’s not just with the startup entrepreneurs, the CEOs and founders, but actually, our staff really likes Mercury. I actually had one of our staffers prompt me to write a blog post about you guys because they love interacting with Mercury so much, which is the greatest compliment an accountant could ever give a bank. That never happens. That’s, like, a once in a million kind of thing.
Immad:	Yeah. That’s awesome. I mean, we just try to make a great experience for everyone involved, and we still have a long way to go, but I’m really glad that they like it.
Scott:	Yeah. You just talked about the getting going takes a little while. Maybe just the quick note on that, is it compliance, is it FDIC stuff? What is the red tape you got to jump through to start a bank?
Immad:	You know, the thing that actually surprised me the most … I mean, a lot of that stuff seems kind of obvious in some ways, right? You’re, “Okay. Obviously, you need more security stuff. You need to think about lawyers to do with banking that you wouldn’t …” Yeah. There’s definitely a bunch of hurdles that normal startups don’t need, but the thing that was most surprising to me and probably took the most time is there’s just a lot of product to build, especially for what we’re doing, which is we want to be a very complete startup bank. We want to … You incorporate, you use us and you continue using us for many years.
Scott:	Yep.
Immad:	There’s just a lot of features involved there, and you can’t really skip any. So, there’s, like, four type of payment types, check, international wire, wire. All of these require a bunch of work both on the front end and back end. Then, there’s a lot of edge cases with bank features. What happens if someone from Puerto Rico signs up? What happens if you lose your card and you want to get a new card, but to a different address? Especially if you’re trying to build a really compelling product, you can’t just go, “Okay. We’ll throw something kind of bad out there,” or, we will force people to email us every time they hit this kind of problem. So, I think that was probably the most surprising thing, that just there’s … I’m used to building products in three months and they’re done and we can just market them.
Scott:	And testing it out there. Yeah. Yeah.
Immad:	Yeah. We can iterate and test it live. But there was definitely much more of a, “Okay. We have to build all of these things.” I think the other side of it, there’s just more things you need to be a bank. We had pen testing from before we launched, we had … Yeah, there’s a lot of things that, at a startup, you wouldn’t even think about for four years normally.
Scott:	Well, it also sounds like you launched with a very full feature set, which is not what most startups do. Most startups get a minimum viable product or something out there and see how people react. But banking is such a serious thing. You probably felt like, “Hey, I got to go out there with the full kitchen sink so that people really trust it and don’t have bad experiences right away.”
Immad:	Yeah. It’s not something that people … It’s really important to us that people use this and they feel great about it. Yeah. We can’t always deliver that, but we really try our hardest to deliver that. If you’re literally using the bank and you’re, “Okay. I need to deposit a check,” and that feature is just not there, what are you going to do? You have to go sign up to another bank-
Scott:	Somewhere else.
Immad:	… Which is the worst thing we could force our customers to do.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	It was a little different for us as well because we’re not trying to prove that banking is a market. We know it’s a market. So, in that kind of situation, you just have to go a little further and go, “Okay. Let’s just make the best product of we can make it.”
Scott:	Yeah. I hear ya. Well, let’s talk about some of those awesome features that you guys have built because from our perspective … I don’t know if … You know this because you’re building something and accountants are probably an important channel for you, but for the outside world, they don’t really think about how the tools they use actually can make their accounts a lot more efficient, and that’s something that Mercury is doing really, really well and it’s one of the reasons we’re promoting you and telling companies that they should be using you. So, one of the things we’ve seen … This is so simple, but so important, is that the data feed coming out of Mercury into things like QuickBooks is incredibly simple and easy for us to use and there’s a lot of recognition inside of QuickBooks of what these transactions are once or twice once they’ve come through, which saves us a tremendous amount of time, which then saves our clients a tremendous amount of money. I mean, is that something you’ve thought of in the early days and perfected?
Immad:	You know, we launched in April, and the loudest clammer of feature missing was like, “Oh, you don’t have QuickBooks. You don’t have Xero.” Yeah. We were like, “Oh, yeah. That’s obvious.” Obviously, prelaunch, we weren’t thinking, “Oh, we need accounting.” I think the reason, actually, some of this stuff is better than other banks are we were … In April, we were like, “Okay. We don’t have QuickBooks integration,” so, actually, our VC, Andreessen Horowitz, they got us introductions. Actually, Intuit was, like, incredibly responsive and fast. Then, we made a special API just for them to integrate with. So, I think a lot of other banks are based on this kind of-
Scott:	Five-server something.
Immad:	… Legacy stuff where, yeah, Intuit is literally, manually scraping all of the other bank’s websites. So, Intuit doesn’t have as much control, and neither does the bank, on what that experience is whereas we made an API specifically for Intuit and Xero that delivers first-in-class data to them.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	So, that leads to A, the data’s cleaner, it doesn’t break as often. With a lot of bank websites, if they make a change, the bank feed breaks and you have to wait for Intuit to fix it. So, it’s just a lot … The system is less fragile because-
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	I think it’s partly because we made it partly because we are an engineering product field company, so we’re happy to build APIs for these things. We don’t want them to scrape our website, which often, some of these people get really surprised about. They’re like, “Wow. You have an API.” I’m like, “Of course we have an API. Why would anyone want to scrape websites to get data?”
Scott:	Yeah. It’s a modern way of building a startup. I think there’s something really cool there in that the investment you made in engineering has a really strong feedback loop into your support team-
Immad:	Yeah.
Scott:	… Because we … One of the biggest issues we have with other banks is that we’re constantly trying to get passwords reset and the founder’s the only one that can reset the password because the system is fragile and we get locked out or QuickBooks gets locked out. So, the fact that we don’t have that problem with you guys. I think maybe for the outside world, these seem like small things, but they’re incredibly important to us. There’s been times we’ve had to in mass move all of our clients off of one bank, the clients that were on a bank, onto another bank because it was just costing us so much time and money. So, the fact that you guys have thought about this, identified that and built that is a huge, huge value add to us.
Immad:	Yeah. I’m glad that you’re recognizing some of these less … There’s a bunch of things we do, which you can’t toot your horn about it if they’re not killer, game-changing features, they’re just really, what I consider, somewhat obvious product features, but you end up spending, actually, a lot of time just perfecting those.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	So, yeah, I think just being product-driven and, like … Yeah. I do think every time someone emails us, I mean, it’s not 100% of the time, but most of the time, I think of it as a failure of the product. I’m just, Okay. Why didn’t the product answer this question and why wasn’t it obvious to them?
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	So, we try to continuously iterate, and think that that’s better hygiene in general. It decreases custom server cost, but also, users just feel better about it when things [inaudible] just can-do things themselves.
Scott:	They’re happier, they’re easier and the accountants are happier and they recommend you. Let’s take a minute to shout out to Mercury’s engineering team because, obviously, you probably planned a lot of this stuff, but they’re the ones who are executing. Great jobs in the engineering team for doing all that stuff.
Immad:	Yeah. I mean it’s all the team. I try to plan nothing as well. [inaudible 00:12:34].
Scott:	You’re just a pretty face.
Immad:	Yeah, exactly.
Scott:	Then, the other thing we really like about you guys is the dashboard is actually really nice. It’s a modern dashboard. When you were kind of thinking about pursuing this opportunity, was that something that you zeroed in early or … Our clients actually get value out of the dashboard instead of other banks where there’s not … It’s just like maybe you’re lucky if you can find out where to click to see your transactions. You know what I mean? It’s very, very different.
Immad:	Yeah. One part of it’s just like if we’re making a product, I just can’t imagine not doing a great dashboard. That’s just the core of the product. I thought it always was we’re building a power user tool for people that sit in front of the computer all the time. So, we want it to be very powerful, but also very intuitive when you’d log in there. We have a great designer who just really goes to the conceptual kind of side of how to display information and make it very easy to do things. But yeah, I think it’s just in the core of how we make things.
Scott:	Did that designer and you chime in about kind of FinTech stuff? I’m kind of surprise … Did they have a FinTech background or are they just that good where they just know what the average founder is looking for in their bank dashboard?
Immad:	I think this concept of FinTech is a little weird. It’s just a product that people use and there’s a few things you can do on it and, hopefully, there’s ways of displaying data. I think it’s just … It’s not very FinTechy. I think one of the things that actually holds people back sometimes in FinTech is there, “Oh, it has to be FinTech, something, something,” and, “You have to have a FinTech background.” This is my first FinTech company.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	I don’t see this necessarily even as a FinTech product. I see it as a good business tool. I mean, obviously, there’s a baseline of FinTech understanding that we have to deliver, but yeah, no. Almost no one in the team had significant FinTech experience.
Scott:	Maybe coming at it without that baggage is … I think I hear what you’re saying. That’s really cool. Well, we’re loving the product, so it’s really working for us. I was telling you off … I think we’ve had, like, four clients in the last three weeks sign up with Mercury, so we’re starting to see the traction. We can see you guys are actually starting to catch fire, which is really exciting. There’s something when we had the mics off that you said, which I really loved, and that you wanted the brand of Mercury and the people in Mercury to really kind of convey that you want the startups to be successful. You’re really vested in their success. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Immad:	Yeah. Yeah. In a weird way, Mercury is this kind of very distributed VC. We don’t we don’t do well if all our startups kind of crash and burn.
Scott:	I never thought that. Yeah, that’s a good analogy.
Immad:	Yeah. I think that’s true for a lot of companies that serve startups. So, I think, especially for us, we want them to do very well. Yeah. As an entrepreneur, as maybe just as a human, I just want these entrepreneurs to do really well and I want Mercury to be, hopefully, a part of their success, whether it’s just making their life easier, giving them a bank account as soon as they want it all or we can build tools, like APIs, and help them understand their finances. If we can just enable a even 2% improvement in the startup’s life, I would feel great about that.
Scott:	You said it as a human. We feel the same way. That’s one of the reasons Vanessa and I got Kruze going was it’s so rewarding to help these founders be successful. The odds are so stacked against them. You’ve done a couple, four times, you know? You know how hard it is. So, seeing them succeed is really amazing and really rewarding for us and our team. But I also think it’s interesting. The reason I ask that question for you is you’ve got the Wall Street banks or even the other banks in Silicon Valley have gotten pretty big now, and so they don’t have … That doesn’t come across, that enthusiasm and the trust and the kind of, “We’re here behind you all the time.”
Immad:	Yeah. I think there’s a few factors that are kind of interesting to observe. Number one, banks see a lot of customers as kind of cost centers-
Scott:	Because they don’t want to talk to them, right, because that’s [crosstalk 00:16:40]-
Immad:	Yeah. Everything about them is not technology-driven, so it does cost them a lot of money to have brunches and people behind. Just doing things costs them a lot of money. So, I think that probably colors the attitude. Then, in a similar vein, they often try to nickel and dime smaller customers. I see it … I don’t know if premium is the right term, but I kind of see it as, okay, you’re small, you’re getting started. Everything should be free and easy. When you’re bigger and you can afford it, maybe there’s some level of cost associated. People have shown when they have bigger companies, they’re more than willing to pay for good products. But I really hate banks, both on the consumer and SMB side, that try to make money on the little guys in these ridiculous ways. If you go to Wells Fargo … I’m going to name that name. If you go there and you sign up as a business account with less than 1,000 dollars, they’re literally charging you, like, 50 cents per transaction or something. It’s these insane things that I’m just like, “Okay. That’s just ruins the experience [crosstalk 00:17:45].”
Scott:	Or the $14 monthly subscription fee for no reason. I mean, that [crosstalk 00:17:50]-
Immad:	Oh, [crosstalk 00:17:49]-
Scott:	Why are you charging me money? You’re making money on my deposits. Why are you charging me for that?
Immad:	Yeah. I mean, it does go … They just don’t make enough money on the deposits, but I mean, make the money on the bigger guys with bigger deposits rather than giving them cheaper and freer things and then the small people have to pay. Yeah. I think, actually, it’s probably a significant kind of reason that smaller companies don’t even set up bank accounts. Then, they have to do weird, hacky solutions where they’re using their personal accounts and all that kind of stuff.
Scott:	That’s not good for us.
Immad:	Yeah.
Scott:	But I just think there’s something refreshing about that attitude because so many of the banks are probably numbers-driven because there are numbers-oriented people there, and it’s like if we can talk to one less person per day or a hundred less people per day, our profit margin goes up and if we can slap this little, tiny fee that no one’s going to notice, our profit margin goes up. Then, the next thing you know, you end up with a bloated bank. In a weird way, they’re kind of doing you a favor. They’ve left the playing field open for you to come in there and kind of treat people the right way, give them a great tool. People are going to sign up for Mercury.
Immad:	Yeah. I mean, to some extent, there’s a classic kind of … There’s a lot of regulations, there’s a lot of monopolistic behavior and you end up having much less innovation, and that’s going to lead to a bunch of these things. But yeah, it’s definitely a field that’s ripe for disruption, and you see that on the consumer side and now on the startup side as well.
Scott:	You talked about … That makes so much sense. There’s something you said kind of … You glossed over it, but I think it’s important for people to know, too, is that you have a complete solution. So, when a startup founder signs up with you, they can handle any kind of payment they need. Maybe kind of walk through those little … It’s like almost checking boxes on the functionality that the startup founder needs.
Immad:	There’s a lot to a bank, but in a reductionist way, you can think about it as there’s money there, there’s ways of receiving the money and sending the money. So, that’s step one of being complete, right? So, we have ACH, and it’s probably the easiest ACH thing there is out there. Normally, ACH is you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to figure out how to do anything. So, you can send ACH, you can receive ACH, you can pull money from your other bank accounts if you have any. Same with wire, both domestic and international. You can-
Scott:	The international is actually hugely important because what we see with our client base is almost everyone has at least contractors across the world, usually a development center or something like that. Then, a lot of companies now have a subsidiary internationally. So, the number one pain point we have with Legacy payment products, like, Bill.com, is doing these international payments. It’s terrible for us and it costs us a lot of time and money to be able to figure out who was actually just paid or Bill.com doesn’t handle it. So, the fact that you guys can handle the international payments and then not in a crazy jump through a million hoops like the wire example, it actually makes us so much more efficient.
Immad:	Yeah. That’s great.
Scott:	Did you know that? Were you like, “The accountants are going to love this?”
Immad:	I mean, a lot of the time-
Scott:	I don’t think so probably.
Immad:	A lot of the time, the founder’s doing these things for themselves as well-
Scott:	That’s a great point.
Immad:	… So, whoever is using the bank account, I want them to love it.
Scott:	Yeah. Yeah.
Immad:	So, if the [inaudible] love it, that’s great. If the founder loves it, that’s great. Then, there’s a lot of nuanced pieces to it. Okay. You sign up as a co-founder, you want to add your bookkeeper. We have a read-only account that you can add your bookkeeper-
Scott:	Oh, hallelujah. Yeah. Yeah.
Immad:	We do real two-factor auth. A lot of banks rely on email and SMS, which are both proven to not be great security devices. Yeah. There’s a lot of these pieces to it.
Scott:	But those are the pieces that allow us to sleep at night. It’s a great observation on the read-only. We actually only take read-only access to our client’s bank account’s credit cards because the Armageddon scenario for us is someone gets crazy or someone gets hacked or something and someone is transferring money around the world. We would not be able to sleep at night. We have incredible … I’m sure you have huge insurance policies. We have huge insurance policies, but even that, that’s not … You just-
Immad:	You don’t want to rely on that.
Scott:	Exactly. Yeah. So, the fact that you guys have thought of that is really huge.
Immad:	Yeah. I think it’s … A lot of the time, even if we are lacking a feature, but when we do build it, it’s going to be really good.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	Right now, we’re building a very fine-grained user permissions model. In some banks, you can do some things like, “Okay. This person can send a wire, but needs approval about this level,” but it’s always through really weird settings and you have to-
Scott:	It’s klugey.
Immad:	It’s very klugey.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	So, yeah, there’s definitely things that we haven’t finished with, but yeah, as customers are, “Oh, we really need this,” we keep building things, and hopefully, we’ll bring great solutions across all of that stuff.
Scott:	But the meat and potatoes … However, a founder wants to pay someone, especially internationally, you guys can handle?
Immad:	Yeah. Pay someone, receive money, look at transactions, integrate with QuickBooks and all … Yeah. There’s a very large kind of base layer of features, and I think we are close to completion with many of them, but there’s definitely a few missing. But yeah, we want to be the for whatever you’d need a bank account for.
Scott:	I love it. Then, some of the other things. Maybe you want to take a second to talk about some of the things that you’re starting to work on for the future or exciting new features.
Immad:	Yeah.
Scott:	We were talking about some stuff off mic, but that the founders can look forward to with Mercury.
Immad:	Sure. I think there’s a continual improvement of the base layer. I don’t know what the right term is. So, we’re working on this user permissions thing, which is actually probably one of the bigger requested features we have. We need to get an iOS app out. Yeah. There’re things that other banks do that we don’t yet do, but we obviously want to spend a lot of time and make them really good once we do them. Yeah. Then, there’s new stuff. I don’t know if I want to announce too much new stuff.
Scott:	All good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Immad:	I know I told you something.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	Yeah. For us, I guess the new stuff falls in the bracket of … So, we have an API recently launched. Obviously, it’s, like, V1 and we’re talking to customers and we’re going to improve that. So, eventually, we want to get the API to a level where anything you could do on the website, you can do on the API. Then, we want to continue to build tools to help you kind of run your business, help you kind of maximize what you do with your cash. Obviously, a lot of startups have cash sitting around and we have a pretty good savings account that gives 1.5% interest, but I think we can do more there. So, yeah, just putting it all together and just … This is all we do. We’re just going to continuously kind of work on the product. We are a very product-driven company, and we’ll continue to improve it.
Scott:	I love it. For how product-driven you are, you also have some nice branding on the website in the sense that I love the little teapot idea.
Immad:	Yeah.
Scott:	Can you talk … It’s just looked like a cute … It reminded me of a … Back in the day, Foursquare had a really nice thing. It was like, “Built with love from Foursquare.” Can you talk about the tea and the teapot stuff?
Immad:	Yeah. I mean, we wanted to have kind of like a premium tier, but we don’t want to call it executive platinum plus kind of thing. We have just a culture of enjoying tea in the office.
Scott:	Vanessa are I are huge tea drinkers every night before we go to bed.
Immad:	Yeah. So, we call it the tea room. My co-founder, she’s super into the idea, and we were like, “Oh, I don’t know if people will get it, but let’s go with it.” But people really liked it. The idea is to make people feel special and included, and there’s actually a bunch of new stuff coming out on the tea room side.
Scott:	Oh, wow. Okay. Awesome.
Immad:	Yeah. We’re going to have, like, rewards and some other benefits that go to our tea room customers. You know, we’ve had it for a while, but we just haven’t kind of publicized them. So, that was kind of the idea, just kind of … Whatever we do, we do want to not sound like a bank and all a little bit … Yeah. I don’t like the transactional and I don’t really the exclusive nature of some of these things. It is just easier for us to obviously give some more to bigger-funded companies. I don’t think the tea room threshold is that big. It’s, like, $250,000. So, that’s kind of the concept.
Scott:	To me, it connotated the relaxed Zen that you … This is a tribute to you and the brand you built because it’s like feels Zen while you’re using Mercury, while you’re looking at a dashboard. It just was such a perfect little touch. If you’re old like me, you remember way back in the day, banks used to give out toasters-
Immad:	Oh, really?
Scott:	… Or other weird stuff. Yeah. You don’t even know. You’re too young. So, there used to be weird freebies that banks would give out, and I was like, “Wow.” I’m a student of FinTech, I love financial services. I was like, “What a smart way of doing that,” and it’s so consistent with your brand. It was just an amazing little add-on there.
Immad:	Yeah. One of our high-level … I mean, I have a few high-level brand things, but I really want people to enjoy the interactions with Mercury.
Scott:	Yeah.
Immad:	Every bank that I use, I’m like, “Oh, man, I have to login again and do this thing, and I know it’s going to be painful because it’s a 20-step process and I have to figure it out.” We don’t want that feeling. We want it to be as easy as possible, and the tea room’s part of that.
Scott:	Yep. It’s really cool. Well, this has been a fantastic podcast. Maybe you can kind of tell people where they can find Mercury and how to reach out to you guys if they’re interested in working with Mercury.
Immad:	Sure. Just go to Mercury.co and you can learn about … Unlike other banks, we try to make everything transparent, all the features on there. Everything’s free pretty much apart from wires. Yeah. It’s a very easy sign up process. It’s all online. If you want to reach out to me, I am @Immad, I-M-M-A-D, on Twitter or you could just email me. Yeah. Jobs, they’re on the website, Mercury.co/Jobs. We’re hiring across, like, eight different roles or something.
Scott:	That’s awesome. I love it. Immad, thank you so much for coming on. Please check out Mercury Bank. It’s fantastic. We’re seeing a lot of customers sign up with it, and selfishly, it makes our life a lot easier. So, thank you for designing it that way and building it that way. (And read our ‘how to read a bank statement” help content too!)
Immad:	Yeah.
Scott:	Thanks, Immad.
Immad:	Thanks for having me, Scott.
Scott:	All right, man. Cheers.
Speaker2:	(singing). Founders and Friends with your host, Scotty.

Immad Akhund of Mercury talks about building a fintech for startups

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