Mercury Bank vs Novo

Mercury goes way beyond the basics when it comes to the safety and protection of your funds. You get full control over ACH pulls, with the ability to approve, limit, or block them before any money leaves your account.

If something looks off, it gets flagged automatically, and nothing moves without your say-so. This is something super unique Mercury built and cuts out the risk of someone draining your account with just your routing and account numbers.

Even more impressive, Mercury offers up to $5M in FDIC insurance through its sweep network and partner banks. Instead of your funds sitting at a single institution, they are automatically spread across multiple FDIC‑insured banks, so your deposits stay protected up to that limit even if one of those banks fails.

With that, you don’t have to think about coverage limits or worry about losing access if a single institution goes down. That kind of protection is rare, and you actually see it pay off when other banks shut down or get acquired and the whole experience falls apart (e.g., when SVB shut down, a lot of our founder friends who raised money moved over to Mercury).

As it stands, Mercury is the largest and most dominant fintech banking layer with a $3.5 billion valuation and $650 million ARR. They've also raised from the most trusted VC's including Sequoia.

Mercury is now profitable as a company (both net income and EBITDA) and has been for more than three years.

With that, Mercury recently applied to be its own bank charter, which is super rare. To put it into perspective, most fintechs never get close to running their own fully regulated bank, so even applying for a national bank charter signals that Mercury is operating at a scale more on par with traditional banks.

If you have $250K in your account, you can enable Mercury's Treasury to earn interest on your cash.

You can set up auto-transfer rules like "transfer to Treasury" or "maintain target balance" that run automatically (daily, specific weekdays, or on set dates like the 1st/15th of the month). So they make it easier to actually earn higher interest rates on idle funds, effectively allowing you to treat your treasury money market account like your savings account.

And unlike other banking solutions, Mercury's Treasury feature is built core into the product, so it feels like it's just a savings account, instead of a tacked on investment account.

One of the nice things about Mercury's Treasury is that it lets you earn interest on the cash sitting in your account without hurting your day-to-day liquidity. You can keep a portion of your funds in a more liquid Treasury option (JTCXX) that still earns solid interest but can be transferred back to your checking account same-day if you need it.

Then you can put the majority of your cash into a higher-yield Treasury option (MULSX) that earns more, but takes 1–2 business days to transfer back.

In practice, this means most of your money stays optimized for better returns while you still have easy access to the funds you need for normal business expenses.

Mercury is exceptional when it comes to moving money, whether you are paying vendors or getting paid. It's one of our favorite reasons why we love Mercury, because it just makes the entire financial admin side of things in our business more enjoyable.

First, paying vendors actually doesn't feel like a chore when it comes to Mercury because they manage the admin that you'd normally have to do manually.

You can send vendors a secure form where they enter their own contact details and bank information, which Mercury then stores so you can pay them by ACH or wire in just a few clicks.

If a vendor sends you an invoice, it will also auto-pull in their details.

Mercury will then also automatically request their W-9, keep track of who has submitted one, and make 1099 filing much easier later on. This is crucial if you work with a lot of contractors.

Having vendor onboarding, payments, and tax paperwork all handled in one place is extremely rare for a bank!

And when it comes to checks, Mercury removes a lot of the manual work. You just fill out a short form, attach any PDFs like invoices or payment details, and Mercury prints the check, includes the attachments (up to 6 pages), and mails it for you.

It honestly feels less like writing checks and more like having an assistant handle it for you. This has come in super handy when we've needed to mail in forms to the government.

Mercury does not charge fees for domestic wires or USD international wires.

Mercury has one of the cleanest invoicing experiences we've used 👌 The user experience is SOOOO good, it makes invoicing feel like less of a chore.

You can quickly create and send invoices, accept payments through ACH transfer, wire transfer, or (if you connect Stripe) credit/debit cards plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, and you can track invoice status and payments right from your Mercury dashboard.

Mercury allows you to open up to 100 checking accounts and 100 savings accounts per business, at no additional cost.

So if you like to organize your money by different expenses such as operations, marketing, payroll, taxes, etc., you are able to do that, and you can even get a credit or debit account for each. Businesses who tend to like that "profit-first" approach appreciate this feature (although in general, the recommended way to set up spending for businesses is via an expense management software).

You can even set up “auto-transfer rules” that keep target balances (e.g. 30% payroll, 20% tax, etc.). Setting this up is incredibly easy and intuitive. That’s the beautiful thing about Mercury, everything is super seamless to use.

For example, for us, most of our cash stays in Treasury to earn interest only what’s needed for monthly operating expenses is moved into checking.

We keep a target balance, and if our balance ever falls below that number, money is automatically transferred. Transfers are scheduled on the 7th and 25th so that checking is topped up right before contractor payments. The point is, you can set this up totally custom for your business.

We choose to keep our federal tax account almost empty and it's only funded before before IRS payments, because otherwise you’re "wasting" money by letting cash sit there earning nothing instead of in Treasury.

If you have multiple businesses, you can set them all up within Mercury and easily jump switch views.

But, okay here’s when it gets crazy. Mercury also has Mercury Personal Banking, which gives you the same incredible user experience but for your personal banking. You can also toggle into your personal bank account from the same user login, which is fantastic.

When they launched Mercury Personal, it cost $240/year to use (and we paid it, because it was that good), but now they give Mercury Personal accounts for free to any Mercury Business users.

This means if you have a Mercury Business account, you can give all of your employees a Mercury Personal account, for free! It’s a fantastic perk because trust us, there is no better personal banking solution that is as smooth and solid as Mercury Personal.👌

With Mercury, you can set up user roles and permissions. For example, you can set who can initiate payments, vs who may only get "view only" capabilities.

There are 6 preset roles: Admin (Full Control), Employee, Accountant, Finance Lead, Money Mover, and Read Only.

This matters if you have different employees that you want to delegate financial admin.

You can also set approval rules, like for example, any payment over $10,000 must be approved by a founder. You can enable per payment approvals, set an amount threshold, and choose who needs to approve (a specific person or a group). Approvals work for all outgoing payments including bills, ACH, and wires.

You can also set up dual admin approvals (aka two admins need approval before money goes out). This isn’t just a tiny feature for approving invoices, it's a core way Mercury lets you structure who can move money and how, so you have real control and guardrails over cash.

It's no secret that Mercury absolutely takes the cake when it comes to user experience. Many users have called Mercury's interface as "one of the best I've ever seen". It's modern, intuitive, and just feels incredibly smooth to use.

And that has been our personal experience using Mercury for the past several years, there is no way you can get us to switch after experiencing such beauty 😍

Novo it works like a normal business checking account: once you've given someone your routing and account numbers, they can initiate ACH pulls into or out of your account, and you’re relying on your own monitoring plus Novo's dispute process if something sketchy shows up.

With that, Novo covers the basics for fund safety (coverage up to $250K), but you do not get extra protection beyond standard FDIC insurance. Unlike Mercury and Relay, they do not automatically distribute your funds across multiple banks.

This should tell you a lot: they are building for businesses with small balances and expect their customers to hold relatively small amounts (think freelancers and solopreneurs).

Their customers usually hold somewhere between $5K–$100K in their account, so if you plan to scale your business, it is better to skip Novo. And in general, since other banking solutions are free too, you might as well use Mercury since it has a better user experience all around.

Novo has no interest-bearing savings account and no treasury product.

Their business checking pays 0% APY and they don’t offer any built-in way to move cash into higher-yield investments or a separate savings account.

Think of Novo as purely an operational checking account, which is why we don't recommend it for any business that intends to scale.

While you can add payees (vendors, contractors) to Novo, there is no self-service vendor onboarding like the other banks have (e.g. no secure link where vendors can enter in their payment details and no automatic collection of W-9s).

Unlike with other banks, Novo won't automatically scrape your invoices and enter them into the system.

Novo's target audience seems to be more freelancers who don't need to often make payments to others, so if you're a growing business, skip Novo.

Novo will write and mail checks on your behalf, however if you need to attach a PDF or form, you're out of luck and will need to figure out another way outside of Novo. This is a bummer if you're trying to send in something like a government form.

Incoming domestic wires are free, although outgoing domestic wires are $30.

International wires are handled through their Wise integration, and you will need to pay the fee's associated.

Novo offers basic invoicing capabilities, although the user experience is not as smooth as with other banks.

Novo gives you a single business checking account per entity, but you can create up to 20 "Reserves," which are internal budgeting buckets for things like taxes, payroll, profit, and expenses.

But heads up, Reserves are not separate accounts or sub‑accounts, they have no unique account/routing numbers, all funds remain part of one Total Balance.

Novo Reserves let you automatically allocate a percentage of each incoming deposit into specific Reserves, which is good for simple Profit‑First‑style budgeting (e.g., 25% of all future deposits to Taxes). However, those rules only move money inside the one checking account into non‑account "envelopes". You can't set target balances like with Mercury and Relay (e.g. when my envelope reaches X amount, transfer money).

Novo lets you open a separate business checking account for each business as long as each has its own EIN, but you need a separate login for each entity, so there’s no single dashboard where you can quickly toggle between multiple businesses under one username.

Novo is business‑only, there is no Novo personal banking product.

With Novo, when you add another user to your account, you're granting them full access and account‑owner‑level privileges. This means they can transfer and withdraw funds since Novo doesn't offer partial or read‑only access.

This is much less safe and protected than other banking solutions out there, which is why if you have a team we don't recommend using Novo.

Novo does not have rule‑based approvals for payments, again making it subpar for any business with a growing team.

Novo's interface is simple to use, although it's not as modern or thoughtful as other banking solutions available.