Through our partner banks, customers get access to a sweep network that provides up to $3M in FDIC insurance by spreading your deposits across up to 12 different banks, including Goldman Sachs & Capital One, without requiring you to open or manage separate accounts.
I can't believe you would dare to imply that these companies and VCs actually bear some responsibility and that their incessant whining that it's not actually their fault at all isn't entirely true.
- For customers on our partner bank Evolve, this was bumped from 1mm to 3mm as of this morning. You get this automatically if you have accepted the T&Cs for the sweep program already; if you haven't you can do so at: https://mercury.com/settings/vault
- For customers on our partner bank Choice, you're still at 1mm FDIC insurance. We are working on getting you an Evolve savings account (or getting increased coverage from Choice) by tomorrow morning, or you can keep excess funds in Treasury (see below)
# treasury
- We also have a product called Mercury Treasury. This allows you to invest in mutual funds, the safest of which is a Vanguard Treasury Money Market fund (VUSXX), which invests primarily in short-term U.S. Treasury bills https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...
- They're not part of any fractional reserve system like with banks; every share of a mutual fund you hold is in your name and Apex can't lend against it (unless you give them permission which would be weird)
- You can automatically sweep any funds between our treasury product and your savings account. Liquidity is about 3 to 4 days.
- All treasury funds are visible on your Mercury dashboard, so you don't have to manually manage fund movements or keep track of your total balance across websites
- You also earn interest on these
AMA if you'd like, though caveat I'm jumping between a lot of Slack messages right now (edit: probably bowing eat to eat lunch)
Each bank your money is in increases FDIC coverage by 250K.
Who is the owner of record on these Mercury accounts at "other banks"?
Can I withdraw *my* money from these "other banks" without Mercury involvement or approval? If not, then *Mercury* may have increased FDIC coverage but the Mercury depositor does not.
You as the customer are the owner of record on the funds. The accounts are held by our partner banks at these other banks, as your agent and custodian (something like "Evolve Bank and Trust for benefit of Acme Corp).
The FDIC insurance applies to the business holding the funds; it is definitely not insuring Mercury itself.
You do need to use Mercury to withdraw the funds; we still run all the authorization and compliance rules around this, and there isn't a facility for you to go into eg United Texas Bank and ask for your money. That said, if Mercury were to go bankrupt tomorrow, your funds are held by our partner banks who have full KYC/KYB info on you would be able to access all your funds.
You might consider providing a "living will" document that keeps your clients up-to-date on where the $$$ are and how they access them. If I'm using something like this I would want to be sure I can make payroll the day after you vanish.
(Not a potential customer or cash management expert, prioritize accordingly.)
My best guess, not until OK'd by a bankruptcy judge. You may have a strong claim on the funds but so does Mercury --- hence the fact stated above that you can't withdraw without their approval. On the other hand, they may be able to withdraw without your approval. A bankruptcy judge is the only one who could override their claim and release these funds to you.
Remember, SVB was an FDIC bank. The reason depositors are able to withdraw money today is because of the quick actions of the FDIC.
My guess, this is a trust/FBO co-mingled type account of some sort.
Only Mercury knows the exact structural details but based solely on their statement above, they have significant control and claims that you can't easily override yourself.
I wouldn't count on this all being resolved quickly in the event of a bankruptcy.
This is the question that needs to be answered before everyone starts throwing their money at these sweep accounts.
SVB offered sweep accounts. Guess how that worked out for folks with money in those accounts? They lost access just like everyone else. If you had a sweep account and you needed to make payroll on Friday, you were not protected.
> We also have a product called Mercury Treasury. This allows you to invest in mutual funds, the safest of which is a Vanguard Treasury Money Market fund (VUSXX)
Mercury charges 60bps for their Treasury product. Why the hefty fee for buying MMFs? VUSXX expense ratio is 9bps for comparison.
Hey Max, I think your offering is amazing but it might be built for the world of yesterday: Since starting this weekend apparently all deposits are 100% insured, why would I go to Mercury to take advantage of sweeps or a money market fund, when my bank offers me slightly higher rates for uninsured-but-insured-in-practice deposits?
1. As others have said in the comments, I wouldn't assume all funds are 100% insured. It is trending that way but I think if you are a CFO managing 10s of millions, its responsible to consider other assets.
2. Our interest rates on Treasury are pretty competitive, up to 4.67% for the slightly-less-conservative fund MULSX (various conditions apply, depends on how much you hold in treasury, etc; see https://mercury.com/treasury for details).
We are OK not having the absolute highest interest rate offering. Our position is:
* The Mercury product is much better than what most banks offer, across features like searching transactions, WebAuthn logins, virtual cards, etc (You can try the whole website at https://demo.mercury.com/)
* Mercury is much better optimized for startups (eg compliance that understands startup needs, doesn't ask your CEO to go into a branch to send wires)
You can always get a higher interest rate by eg buying treasuries yourself. Our position is for most founders, investing in these mutual funds is a safe, no-brainer options that optimizes for safety while keeping the convenience of a single dashboard.
I get this line of thinking, but I also think there's a counterargument that we're all on notice now that banks can go under. As commenters in other threads have noted, people are rebalancing their personal and business accounts right now. Companies like Roku probably won't have $400M at one institution anymore (without outside insurance). That means that if this happens again, many of the people who would have been screwed without a backstop this time around will be in the clear next time. There won't be as much pressure applied by high-level executives and lobbyists, so, as the saying goes, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results".
How is this safer than the alternative? There's no world in which the FDIC lets a bank the size of SVB default on it's deposits, so there are basically 2 scenarios here:
1) You get bailed out no matter what your insurance rate
2) Defaults are at such a high rate that the FDIC doesn't have the money to bail everyone out, the economy tanks, and all businesses that rely on risky VC investment fail anyway
It's like betting $100 on something that won't happen until you're dead. Sure, you might be correct, but there's no real benefit to it.
Came in to say that we have had a very positive experience with Mercury’s UX, features and support after using Mercury for almost 2 years. Lots of simple details and decisions that make a big impact on our day to day usage. The only bank site where I look forward to logging in
No experience with this actual Money Market Fund account announcement
Recently opened a Mercury account and the first impression is great. But to add, their support was very quick to reach out with a human when I had a minor issue and some questions during the signup process.
If products like this become widespread isn't it equivalent to 'tricking' FDIC into covering a higher % of your deposits? It appears this is more or less a service that takes your money and opens a lot of smaller accounts spread throughout all the different banks. Imagine that everyone did this. Now in the event of a medium scale bank default FDIC needs to cover not only the first 250k of a lot of people's money, but some multiple of that depending on how many banks that customer also had money in.
Doesn't this stress FDIC insurance as a system?
It seems to me it's counter to the intention of FDIC insurance in the first place (keep the small guy's money safe, assume the rich guy has plans to keep himself safe)
As of yesterday the FDIC is officially backstopping 100% of deposits, even beyond the $250k limit. They decided that confidence in the banking system takes precedence over that limit. The $250k limit no longer exists, de facto at least, if not de jure. So it's actually unclear that a service like this is even useful anymore.
The FDIC is backstopping deposits over $250k because Silicon Valley Bank has enough money to pay out all deposits. It’s just locked up in 10 year treasuries. The FDIC will give you your money back, sit on the treasuries, and get paid back by the Federal Government when the bonds mature. The bank itself is worthless but the money didn’t disappear.
They also have a portfolio of (dogshit, I’m sure) loans to startups that I would wager is worth at most 50 cents on the dollar. Deposit liabilities at SVB will exceed asset liquidation value, I’d bet a decent sum of money on that.
Their whole problem was that they didn't have anybody to loan to. Startups aren't borrowing from banks, they're getting VC money and parking it at SVB.
Their "dogshit" is 10 year treasuries almost exclusively.
Not everyone will want to rely on a not-guaranteed discretionary call happening again. Don't think of this like a Supreme Court decision that is unlikely to be overturned for decades if not longer.
No, because the FDIC would collect higher fees commensurate with the increase in insured deposits. It would reduce profits for banks like SVB which have a large number of uninsured deposits and were able to take advantage of a "fed put".
The FDIC just collected a fee from all remaining banks to make SVB depositors whole, so they are evidently willing to reduce profits in order to insure deposits.
- The FDIC's risk is distributed across many bank balance sheets
- The FDIC is collecting insurance premium on these deposits
Structures like this have existed for decades.
[ETA: I've just seen a good bit in the WSJ that such structures do abuse deposit insurance, since they allow large depositors to avoid inspection of bank liquidity. So maybe I'm wrong.]
This would only apply stress in the case of widespread failure. One bad bank means only using $250k in insurance.
On the flip side, why would you engage in a bank run when you’re fully insured? It seems it would slow the incentives to be part of a bank run, which is the systemically damaging part.
Does this resonate with their target customer, as what they're looking for, to hold their money and provide misc. banking services?
(Personally, I love their decor and lifestyle aesthetic, but... I'd prefer to entrust my money to a place that seemed interested in providing good customer service for rock-solid banking services to small-fry me, yet was also a time-tested battleship of a trusted institution, where the head of it could get POTUS on the phone if ever needed.)
It sounds like a useful and important product (if perhaps duplicative of extant offerings) but I'm afraid the government has blown up your market.
All one has to do now is bank somewhere that "everyone thinks safe". So long as the community sharing this belief is sufficiently large and politically connected, the government will underwrite their belief. Questioning the groupthink is for risk nerds.
Just remember that if Mercury abruptly goes bankrupt, it is likely going to take days if not weeks or months for you to get access to those underlying funds from an operational perspective.
Fintechs that rely upon Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) arrangement like this are woefully under-regulated.
Guys can we keep quite about this please. Yesterday the party line was it was outrageous to suggest a company could keep money in more than one bank and or in treasuries. Have you no empathy?
I know I'm the one who submitted the one linking directly to mercury.com/vault but shouldn't that be the link here? It has all the information outlined in the current twitter thread.
They were already at $1M FDIC insurance. I was in process of transferring money out when I got the email about this. Still going to transfer a little out, but less then I was going to before.
This is a bad take on what FDIC did with SVB, and certainly not an assumption that is safe to rely on. Please do not spread this, as people who believe it carry a real risk of financial harm.
There are multiple threads trying to go into detail about the nuance of what happened, so I'll spare from rehashing it here. But it certainly was not promising FDIC coverage on all deposited funds.
There are many examples of cases in which depositors take a 4-10% haircut, and receive it months or years after the failure (meaning the haircut is quite a bit larger when factoring for time).
Thanks for that. Looks like the IndyMac uninsured did only get 50% on the uninsured portion.
Was always wondering if they got more, but nope.
(They did get lucky in that fdic limit was $100k and I think they retroactively upped it to $250k on this failure, but that probably hurt rather than helped anyone with over $500k or so).
Many other examples of >10% losses, would be cool if someone did an analysis.
How much would you like to bet that FDIC will formally announce 100% protection for depositors and the cost of that will be borne by FDIC member banks along with dramatically
increasing banking scrunity for banks of all sizes.
Bank stocks will crash more, and consumers will ultimately feel the pinch as banks use the only tools then available to create margins: dramatically increased fees and cost of borrowing.
There was absolutely zero announcement yesterday that 100% of all deposits in all banks are guaranteed by FDIC. There was a commitment to cover 100% of SVB and Signature Bank deposits under the systemic risk exception. You can take issue with this, or suggest that they will offer protection for 100% of deposits in the future, and that's fine. I'm not going to argue that point, since I don't know what will happen next.
But to say that the FDIC came out and announced 100% protection of all deposits is no more true today than it was when banks were bailed out in the '08 crisis, and there have been many, many examples of depositors losing money since those bailouts happened.
Please link to the policy where the FDIC announced 100% coverage of all deposits in all banks, not the press release where they announced providing depositors coverage in two specific banks.
Edit: this is not debating nuances. Insurance coverage is not what we feel and think it is. It's what is specifically documented and funded. In this case, the FDIC is neither documenting nor funding 100% coverage for all deposits in the nation. They may decide to do so, but they certainly have not at this time.
There was an article this morning about Silicon Valley VCs throwing a temper tantrum over the whole SVB debacle that was flagged, locked, and hidden with incredible speed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35138024). I'm sure the fact that it ran counter to YC's interests had nothing at all to do with it.
Through our partner banks, customers get access to a sweep network that provides up to $3M in FDIC insurance by spreading your deposits across up to 12 different banks, including Goldman Sachs & Capital One, without requiring you to open or manage separate accounts.