Brex was able to show us a demo and as part of the trial we attached our SVB account which causes a $0.01 deposit and withdrawal. After doing this we received an email from our SVB sales rep acknowledging the transaction: "It looks like I see a penny test from Brex on June 3rd so it may be that you just set something up." I'm not sure what's buried in the SVB ToS, but SVB sales reps looking into our transactions didn't sit quite right with me. Then we told them that we decided to go with Brex because we liked the solution and not being able to get a demo from SVB made it basically a non-starter. A couple days later we get a call from a Managing Director and he tells us that the line-of-credit will need to be venture debt and backed by equity or warrants, which we're not interested in since this is only a rainy-day LoC and we've got plenty of money in our SVB account. Fast forward to today and they tell us that they won't give us the LoC anymore unless we also agree to use their Innovator card.
Basically I'm looking for other banks that are great to work with and understand how startups work and the needs they have. I've looked at Mercury, and we have an account there, but I was hesitant to move too much away from SVB because it "just worked", but obviously now I'm reconsidering. Hopefully HackerNews has some good advice and recommendations.
Lots of people switch over from SVB to us. Happy to answer any questions you have.
We go out of our way to be transparent in pricing, have great customers service and "just work". We dont currently do LoCs though.
Also feel free to email me (my username AT mercury.com)
For issuing cards, you can use Stripe nowadays. If you're doing this as part of your business (e.g. like Expensify is doing), its available to all US based businesses: https://stripe.com/issuing
The more convenient Stripe Corporate Card (which sounds like that may be your use case?) is still invite only: https://stripe.com/docs/corporate-card
(I myself am queued up for an invite on the Corporate Card, and using Chase Credit Cards in the meantime, which are okay, but not great)
The requirements are simple:
- a proper EU based IBAN
- SEPA bank transfer
- SEPA direct debit
- proper customer support
- proper web experience
- debit card
- (preferably) limited credit card support
- honest and transparent pricing
There's obviously the company's home country banks, but I'm specifically wondering about banks offering EU wide services. Either I'm not looking well enough or there isn't really a decent bank offering these services EU wide:
- Many more traditional banks don't seem to be interested in working with companies in different EU countries.
- N26 doesn't seem to do llc's.
- Revolut doesn't have a proper web client.