Mercury Bank vs Relay

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 😍

Relay operates like a traditional bank. Once you hand out your routing and account numbers, vendors can pull ACH payments just like they would with any other bank. This is risky because once someone has your routing and account numbers, they have the bare minimum they need to try pulling money out of your account without you pushing “send” on anything.

That’s why “just handing out” your routing and account numbers is more risky than sharing a unique payment link and why most businesses tend to prefer stronger controls.

With that, Relay’s FDIC coverage goes up to $3 million dollars. Relay spreads your money across several FDIC-insured banks automatically so that more of your balance stays insured instead of being stuck at the $250k limit of a single bank.

Relay does not have a treasury account.

Instead, it offers a savings account where you can earn interest on your balance. With that, the interest rate varies and depends on the subscription plan you pay for. So if you're on the free plan of Relay, expect to get a lower interest rate.

While this is simple, the reality is you are not investing in government securities, treasury funds, or multi-pool yield strategies and it means you miss out on the higher yields.

In summary, if you have a large amount of money in your account (e.g. $250K+) you should automatically consider switching to Mercury since you will make more money on your money.

When you forward a bill to Relay's unique Bills Inbox email, it automatically extracts key details like vendor name, invoice number, amount, and due date using built-in document recognition so that you don't need to manually enter in the details. You can then review and edit the bill before paying.

The thing is, Relay doesn’t have vendor onboarding, which means it doesn’t automatically collect W-9s. This puts more admin on your plate before tax time. It’s a small thing that makes a huge difference if you work with a lot of contractors. You’ll need to email everyone separately, and it’s just a pain.

Similar to other banks, with Relay you can create a check payment and they will print it off and mail it on your behalf.

That said, you cannot send a physical attachment (e.g. PDF or form) with the check. You can upload it to their system and include a memo line, but if you need to send a physical document to the government for example, you'd need to figure out a solution outside of Relay.

Domestic and International wires to a USD account are free.

Relay includes invoicing and payment links so you can create, send, and track invoices without needing a separate tool.

Relay lets you open up to 20 checking accounts per business, which you can nickname for things like Income, Profit, Owner’s Pay, Taxes, and Operating Expenses, plus up to 2 savings accounts that currently earn around 1–3% interest on idle cash.

Relay is built around "Profit First" banking, that is one of their core marketing messages.

You can create percentage‑based auto‑transfer rules (e.g. Say you set a target of $1K in your income account, and twice a month, anything above that is distributed by percentage to Payroll, Tax, Owners Comp, etc.). So say your balance hits $5k, the $4k will be distributed accordingly to your percentage rules.

As a heads up though, these rules only apply between Relay checking accounts (not to savings accounts) where as with Mercury for example, you can set up similar rules that also work between savings and Treasury accounts.

If you run multiple businesses, Relay lets you register several entities under a single login and then toggle between them from a dropdown, with each business having its own set of accounts, cards, and permissions.

That said, Relay does not offer any Personal Banking solutions so you'd still need a totally separate bank for that (we are obsessed with Mercury Personal Banking, which is why we use Mercury for both business + personal, but hey, even if you use Relay for business we'd recommend switching to Mercury for personal use since its that good).

Relay gives you team access controls with several permission levels like Administrator, Manager, Cardholder, Deposit‑only, Approver, and Read‑only, and you can restrict people to specific checking/savings accounts so, for example, your marketing manager only sees the Marketing account and not Payroll.

Relay supports bill approval workflows inside its bill pay module: you can set rules like “bills over 1,000 dollars require approval” and route them to one or more approvers before they can be paid, which is great for small teams wanting oversight on vendor payments.

As a heads up though, these approval rules are tied to only bills in Relay (not any payment over X amount via ACH, wire, internal transfers, etc must be approved).

Relay has an easy to use interface, especially when it comes to setting up the auto-transfers between accounts for Profit-First banking. The app is clutter free and the dashboards are simple, intuitive, and uncluttered.