Rho vs Novo

Rho doesn’t have “every ACH debit needs your explicit approval” workflows, so it works more like a traditional bank. Once you share your routing/account number, ACH debits can hit your account and you manage risk through monitoring yourself, and disputes rather than pull approvals.

On the contrary, Rho uses a huge sweep network (400+ banks) to offer up to $75 million in FDIC insurance per entity. Your money is split into chunks of up to $250K and parked across many FDIC‑insured banks.

Despite the large FDIC coverage, Rho itself was last publicly valued at around $1.5B in its Series C round and they're likely not yet profitable.

Rho Treasury requires a $350K minimum to even unlock it, which is a bit of a bottle neck for most early business owners (unless you've raised funds).

Once you have access, you can set up auto-transfer rules (called "auto-sweeps"). They work between checking and Treasury to maintain your cash flow. You can set a minimum checking balance (e.g., $50K operating float) and top-up amount (min $25K).

Rho Treasury also gives you the option to keep some cash in a same day liquid pool while putting the majority into a higher-yield option that takes 2–3 business days to pull back, letting you get better returns without fully sacrificing cash flow.

While Rho handles payments well, it's more of a "finance team tool" rather than a "delightful minimalist banking solution like Mercury for example.

Rho lets you forward invoices into a dedicated Bill Pay inbox, where it scans invoices and create draft bills so you're not hand-entering everything. From there, you can send invoices for approvals so invoices can be reviewed before you make payment. You can also make payments in bulk (batch approving a bunch of invoices) to help streamline workflows.

It handles vendor management, where you can store profiles, and payment methods in one place.

It streamlines W-9 collection and 1099 filing workflows automatically, which is helpful for high-contractor teams.

With Rho you initiate the payment, and it handles printing and mailing the physical check along with any attachments. This is especially useful for vendors (or landlords) who still insist on paper.

Domestic and International wires to a USD account are free.

Rho allows you to create and send invoices, but it's user experience is not as "delightful" as Mercury.

Rho lets you create multiple operating accounts (checking sub‑accounts) so you can organize cash for things like payroll, taxes, and other expenses.

Rho does not support "Profit First" style banking.

You can have a rule that says "transfer $5K each month to this account" but you cannot have rules like "take 10% of all deposits into this account and spread it to these 10 sub‑accounts" the way Mercury or Relay's auto-transfer rules can do percentage of balance/percentage of incoming funds across multiple destinations.

So if this type of banking is important to you, skip Rho as you'll need to do it manually.

If you run multiple businesses, you can associate multiple business entities with a single Rho user login and easily switch between them.

That said, Rho 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 Rho for business we'd recommend switching to Mercury for personal use!).

Rho gives you granular control over who can see what and who can move money.

There are six pre‑set roles: Account Owner, Administrator, Department Owner, Employee, Bookkeeper, and Investor each with its own permission bundle.

Rho has a full payment approval framework that lets you define when transactions need sign‑off, how many people must approve, and which specific users are allowed to approve.

You can create rules like "for X dollar amount or above, require Y approvals," and assign one or more approvers. For example, you might require one approver for payments over $1k and two approvers for payments over $10k.

Rho has a good user experience for finance teams, but if you're a business owner or founder you'll find the interface feels a lot more dense than something like Mercury.

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.