Introducing our new credit card — IO

Immad Akhund, CEO and co-founder

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of our new corporate credit card, IO. Now, our customers can use Mercury for their credit card spending, earn 1.5% cashback, and monitor every aspect of their banking* and spending from one dashboard. What’s more, you can get an IO card with just $50,000 in a Mercury account — the lowest qualifying deposit amount for any startup card.

Most people think of banking platforms as bundles of services, and some have wondered why we haven’t offered a credit card before now. Interestingly, when we started Mercury, we did consider launching with a credit card as our first product. That said, we recognized that in order to achieve our goal, we needed to start with creating a better bank account instead.

Why start with bank accounts? First off, we’ve always believed that in order to build a truly great financial product for companies, it’s important to start with the most fundamental layer. Every founder needs a bank account to run their business — it’s the very first thing they set up. Second, bank accounts are the final system of record for your cash and financial position. And third, bank accounts are the ideal foundation from which to build additional financial features. By providing the core financial services first and building out our banking platform from there, our customers don’t have to sign up for anything else; they can use Mercury for all financial workflows across their entire team. This approach has led to the creation of Mercury Treasury and Venture Debt, and now we’re continuing to build out that platform with credit cards.

As with everything we engineer at Mercury, IO is designed to empower founders and finance teams — and to enable them to spend less time thinking about banking. We wanted to provide a credit card that was fast to set up, easy to use, and ideal for scaling your business. There are other corporate cards out there, but we didn’t think about them much while we built IO. We created IO with three main goals in mind:

1. Make IO unbelievably simple and smooth. Everything — from application to daily use — should be deliberate and effortless. We didn’t build the card with any gimmicks or learning curve. It works exactly how you’d expect it to.

2. Make IO beautiful. It’s rare for a software company to ship a tangible product, and we wanted to design something that would represent our values in the physical world.

3. Build IO for scale. The companies that started on Mercury when we first launched in 2019 are now reaching Series C, D, and beyond. We’ve seen massive growth from our customers, and we wanted to make this a key piece of IO’s product experience.

Building IO wasn’t a trivial process — it required the work of 25 engineers over more than six months and was time intensive for a reason: we didn’t want to build just any product, we wanted to build an exceptional one. We’ve made significant investments in support, compliance, controls, and risk to bring this corporate credit card to life. And we’ve established dedicated product and fraud teams to make IO’s creation and launch as seamless and deliberate as possible. Because we invested the time and resources to do this right, we are able to make IO immediately available to thousands of customers — and offer such a low qualifying deposit amount.

We have a long roadmap ahead for IO and this launch is very much just the start of what we are building at Mercury. Experience IO for yourself and use it to take your company further, faster. And as always, keep your eyes out for what’s coming next.

— Immad Akhund, CEO and co-founder, Mercury

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC. The Mercury Debit Cards are issued by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC, pursuant to licenses from MasterCard. The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from MasterCard.