Podcast 271: Immad Akhund of Mercury

Welcome to the Lend Academy Podcast, episode number 271. This is your host, Peter Renton, founder of Lend Academy and co-founder of Lendit Fintech. Today's episode is sponsored by Lendit Fintech Digital, the new online community for for financial services innovators. Today's challenges are extraordinary, with the upheaval affecting all areas of finance. More than ever before, we need to come together as an industry to learn from each other and make sense of this new world. Join LendIt FinTech Digital to connect and learn all year long from your peers and from the FinTech experts. Sign up today at digital.lendit.com. Today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Imad Akhund. He is the CEO and founder of Mercury. Now Mercury is a super interesting company. They are basically a bank built for startups. And so they, you know, Imad saw this from personal experience that, you know, well, whereas the banking industry has made considerable strides on the consumer front, there's a lot of neobanks out there that got really great user experiences, compelling offerings, but the same hasn't happened on the business side, particularly when it comes to startups. There's really not many digital-first offerings when it comes to banking. So Mercury, you know, is building that and we get into that in some depth. We talk about the, you know, the banking landscape and the new offerings from Cabbage and Intuit. And obviously you've got Silicon Valley Bank in here that are also doing things. And we talk about why Mercury is different. You know, we also talk about a new initiative with Mercury Raise and what he's doing there and then where he sees, what is the vision for Mercury going forward? It was a fascinating interview. Hope you enjoy the show. Welcome to the podcast, Imad.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

My pleasure. So I'd like to get these things started by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. I know this is, uh, you know, you've had it, you've had an interesting career. This is not your first rodeo. So why don't you give the listeners a little, some highlights before you, uh, you started Mercury?

Sure. I've been doing startups, starting startups since 2006. So Mercury is actually my 4th company. My first one was in London. I grew up in London. Then I moved to San Francisco, did a YC company back in 2007. That went okay. We did a talent acquisition. And then I did my third company, which was really most of that time from the end of 2008 to 2016 when we sold it. It was a developer tool around ad tech. And actually the idea for Mercury I had about 2013 when I was kind of halfway through that startup. And I was just kind of very frustrated with the banking options we had as a startup. And it just turned out like no one did it from 2013 to when I started in 2017, which is good.

Right, right. So then what was it specifically that you were trying to solve there where you said that, you know, obviously, you know, large banks and, you know, actually most banks don't really cater to startups, they cater to businesses. But what was it specifically that you were looking for?

Yeah, I mean, you know, throughout that journey from 2006 onwards, there was this whole kind of concept of consumerization of enterprise, right? Like in 2006, everything kind of sucked, right? Like all the enterprise software was really, you know, 1995, you couldn't use it, it was all desktop apps, it was just a very frustrating experience. And then over time, you know, payroll improved through Gusto and Zenefits and all of these providers, you know, communications improved, like Slack came out and You know, I could see all of these things improving in my day-to-day entrepreneurial life, but the bank was basically exactly the same, right? Maybe they'd launched a mobile app that kind of worked. But apart from that, there'd been no innovation. There was— and it didn't seem to be improving. While at the same time, on the consumer side, banking was improving. I'm from the UK. So yeah, I could see that there was Monzo was kind of blowing up. And there was, on the business side, there was Tide and Qonto. So I could, yeah, I felt like this wave was coming with kind of challenger banks or neobanks, where all of these experiences around banking would also be kind of at the same level as experiences with everything else in running your business. And, you know, the crazy thing to me was finances is just so important to a business, right? Like, that's how you live and die.

Right.

Like, you're looking at your revenue and your costs every day almost. And it's, yeah, it's a major stress point. And you've got this bank software where you just like really hate logging in. You can't get any insight out of it. We wanted to automate things with our— we were basically kind of a marketplace where we were paying our developers, like 600 developers. We wanted to automate some of that. And we'd end up just literally spending 3 days at the end of the month, like manually typing in numbers into the bank interface. Yeah. That's, that was the only way to kind of do it. They had no API. So those were some of my frustrations. And, you know, no one else was improving it, so I thought I'd do it.

Right, right. Well, you know, it's, it's not, it's not a simple undertaking to, to start a bank. It's a little bit more, you know, a little bit more complex from the— particularly from the regulatory side, I know. But I guess maybe I'd love to get you sort of just to take a step back and say, when you are talking to startups today, how do you describe Mercury?

Yeah, good question. So You know, partly depends what stage it is. I think if you're right at the start, like you're incorporating a company, you want to get a bank account going. You know, no startup entrepreneur wants to go walk into a branch, sit there for 3 hours to set up a bank account. They want to do it from the computer. That's what they're used to. So, you know, we're all online. It takes 10 minutes to fill it out. We try to make it kind of as seamless and easy as possible.

Mm-hmm.

And at the end of it, you get a bank account that's like kind of suitable for your startup, right? If you're a funded startup and you have $2 million and you want to be able to pay out like $300K to an engineering team in Germany or whatever it is, we enable all of those things from day one. You don't have to kind of go back to the branch and say, hey, why don't I have wires enabled on my account and all of this kind of stuff? So yeah, by being like made for funded startups and all startups, but especially funded startups, like we make all of those kind of things seamless and easy. And then for established companies that want to consider switching, the sell is much more around like, hey, have a really easy way to send money. It takes like a few minutes. It's seamless. You can search your transactions very easily. We give you virtual cards. We have an API. All of these things are kind of create like this additive improved experience where instead of thinking that, oh, I have to do my bank thing, I'm going to get locked out of my account. It's going to be so painful. I have to call them up, all of this kind of. Yeah, these kind of things that go through the back of every entrepreneur's mind when they're dealing with their bank account. We just want it to be super seamless and easy to do.

Right, right. Okay. So are there— so the core functions that you have, I mean, are you sort of— do you feel like your set, your feature set is relatively complete, or are you kind of continuing to— I mean, obviously, you, you, I'm sure you've, you've got a product pipeline, but I'm just thinking about, you know, there's certain basics that every, every small business needs. I mean, do you see the basic feature set— are you missing anything now, or do you feel like it's pretty complete for You know, for someone to get going?

Yeah, I mean, there's like core banking, and that feature set is very complete. We do— yeah, you can send a check, you can send ACH, you can send wires, you can send international wires. And obviously, it's a real bank account with an account number and routing number, so money flows through it. But, you know, I think the future of banks is not like there's a bank account with an account number, routing number, and you're done. I think it's building these kind of additional financial and business tools that really help you run your business in the long term. I think for that part, we're like 5% of the way through. I think there's way more we can do to help entrepreneurs. And we've just— building a bank, like one of the tricky things is you have to build all of the features first, then you can start innovating. And we have like a pretty high standard for what we would consider shipping. So yeah, it took— even after we launched, which was only in April 2019, I don't think we were like 100% done with the features and even those core features, and we've kind of improved them a lot since. In terms of missing things, yeah, there's a couple of things I think, like mainly cash and check is like, there's, if you're dealing with a lot of cash, like you need to go to a bank branch to deposit it. And yeah, I don't think, like we really focus on kind of digital-first businesses.

Right.

That's the term for it, like people that do all of their business online, and it's all kind of You know, it's all bits. It's a little harder if you're, yeah, if you're a restaurant and you're dealing with cash and all those types of businesses. I don't think Mercury is like 100% appropriate for. Right, right, right.

Understood. So it's interesting there you're talking about, you know, using the bank account as a way to kind of provide more intelligence to, you know, an entrepreneur. Now, because we've had— there's been some movements just recently this year in that area. Obviously, we've got Cabbage who announced a bank account. We've got Intuit that announced at a similar time period earlier this year. And I'm curious if you— how you view those kinds of moves, because these are obviously companies, particularly with Intuit, that have a lot of intelligence already on a small business. And probably many of your customers are also using QuickBooks to run the accounting side of their business. So what do you make of those moves?

Yeah, so I think for the places we target, kind of startups, you know, you kind of want a bank that really like understands what you do and gives you like all of these. It's not just here's the features, like it's a bank account with a debit card, you kind of want to be able to, you know, give customer service in a really like seamless way where, you know, if someone calls you and you know they're a funded startup and they want to receive like $5 million from like a Series A investor, You don't want to be like not understanding what they're talking about, which is like, what happens if you deal with kind of a non-startup bank? So Intuit especially is like much more of like a broad SMB play.

Right.

And I think, yeah, potentially in like the long tail of SMB, they can do a reasonable job. They already have the customer and they can give a basic bank account. I think for where we're going, which is, you know, yes, we serve like smaller companies, but, you know, as these companies scale, we want to be there with them. And we want the smaller companies to feel like, hey, when they're ready to scale, that Mercury's still like the bank for them. So we've, you know, over time we've developed a bunch of features that are, yeah, if you're like a 2-person company, they're not super useful. Like we have kind of fairly rich kind of user permissions management and card management and APIs and all of these things. So we want to, and we're going to continue adding those features that kind of scale with companies. So that's one aspect of that. I think the other thing that's That's kind of interesting about banking, and the truth for like most fintech is a lot of the kind of nuances in the customer service and the kind of compliance and fraud infrastructure. You really have to kind of understand your customers and be able to service them as quickly as they expect. And also, if you don't have like a compliance or fraud infrastructure, like it tends to happen that the compliance and fraud infrastructure kind of suits the lowest common denominator, right?

Right.

Whereas if you have a targeted kind of vertical industry, you can really understand what the needs are for these startups and service them accordingly. So some examples of that is, you know, I talked about limits earlier, but, you know, we also deal with a few crypto startups and they have like some specific needs that like, you know, banks don't want to work with normally. So there's a bunch of these things where, you know, because we understand our market, we cater towards them and we continue building features for them. Right, right.

So it sounds like what you're— I mean, obviously you've got Silicon Valley Bank that has kind of the venture-backed businesses. You know, they have a pretty good market share, I believe, in that. Are you really going after their customers, like trying to get them earlier, or do you feel like they're working in your space or not?

Yeah, they're by far the primary competitor. I would say 50% of US startups probably choose SVB, or they choose SVB. So those are the ones we're going for. We do go earlier in the lifecycle of the startup, like we want to be there from day zero.

Right.

Whereas I think SVB probably prefers like later stage companies to some extent, at least their kind of infrastructure makes it easier for them for that. But banking's very sticky, getting there super early and sticking with the Customer and providing them everything they need as they scale is, I think, a really good way to kind of—

Yeah. I mean, no one really switches their bank unless they've got a real reason to be, because they're dissatisfied. If you're, you know, once you get them, you know, they're not going to leave if they're satisfied. It's because it's painful to switch.

It's painful. And, you know, if we're serving them correctly, there's really no reason to do it. Yeah.

So just on the regulatory side, you obviously, you don't have a banking license. How are you delivering the actual bank accounts? I mean, I presume you're partnering with an FDIC-insured bank, correct?

Yeah. So we partner with this bank called Evolve Bank and Trust. It's one of the main kind of fintech bank partners that people use nowadays. And that's something that's, you know, that's a real enabler for kind of fintechs going after depository banking. Even in 2017, there was many less kind of bank options that were available to startups. Now, every like 6 months, I'd say there's 1 or 2 like extra kind of banks that you have some fintech partner with, which is really cool. Like it's enabling a lot of innovation. Right, right.

Yeah, that's good. And speaking of innovation, when you look at your user experience, I feel like we've had this movement over the last several years for user experience on the phone, on the consumer side has really gotten, I would say, very good. I mean, it's not very, I mean, there's obviously, there's degradations or gradations of good, but You know, on the small business side, it feels like user experience is not something that has been focused on. And I look at your app and I look at— I'm looking at the way you even design your website. It feels like a consumer offering as far as user experience goes. So tell us, what's your approach to user experience?

I mean, it starts mostly by having just like great designers that are very, very thoughtful about it and really care. Yeah, we put like experience at the forefront of like what we do. It's not, you know, it is a bank obviously, but it's like we want to deliver a great experience and, you know, I think having a culture of like really caring about that, you know, iterating it, improving it over time, that's kind of I think the core of it. There's kind of 2 types of like, you know, on a high level, there's kind of 2 types of startups, and it happens even more so in fintech, there's, you can have like one kind of core idea. And that's kind of the thing that the startup blossoms from, right? Like, if you take Robinhood, it's kind of free trading. And that's, that's what the startup blossom is. But then there's this other type of startup, which is like, you know, actually, the current experience kind of sucks. I mean, we can improve it in lots of ways, which gives you a 10x improvement, which is, you know, more like Zoom or even Slack, right? There was other ways to communicate that there were never great. So that's, yeah, I would put Mercury in that second kind of set of startups. Like, the core thing we do is deliver this great experience that's like, has to be end-to-end kind of seamless and, you know, really upgrade these things. And so that's the core of it. I think the original team, you know, me and Jason and Max, my co-founders, we're just also like, generally speaking, uncompromising when it comes to having to deal with bad experiences. And we're, you know, we're always pushing to— pushing to optimize and improve these things. And we have, you know, Mercury is the biggest user of Mercury by far. So we're— all of our employees are in there. So we have, yeah, we have also probably the most users on Mercury, of Mercury accounts. So, you know, we're using it all the time. So if there's things that are frustrating us, they're frustrating our customers, so we can improve them over time.

Right, right. Yes, you eat your own cooking. That is good to see. So one question, like you say, you're trying to get businesses at day zero. How do you reach those businesses? What are you doing to get the word out about Mercury?

Yeah. I think it can sound a little lame when people say this, but really people just really love Mercury. So they always recommend Mercury to everyone. So I think that is the core of how we grow. And it is tricky to get the business at the exact right point that they're thinking about a new bank, right? Either they're incorporating or maybe at some point later they think about I wanna switch banks. So it's not, you know, some other business SaaS things you can buy, you can try to win the customer at any point. So for us, you know, having those customers that are real like believers and making them like not just slightly happy, but really, really happy and wanting them, yeah, to the point where they wanna share Mercury with their friends and other entrepreneurs. And, you know, entrepreneurs always have other entrepreneur friends. It's very hard to kind of do this by yourself. So that's the core of it. We also partner with incorporation tools. That's kind of the second. And if there was like one big channel for us, that's one of the bigger channels. So we work with Stripe Atlas, Clerky, Jumpstart, Capbase. There's a bunch of these kind of new companies coming up that help people set up their business and sometimes kind of manage it later on as well. And we tend to kind of be a really good bank partner for them because, you know, once again, you've just set up your business online, You don't want to have to, like, from the incorporator's perspective, they don't want to say to them, hey, now go to a bank branch to set up this. Like, they already have all the documents, they can deliver a good experience through Mercury.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Okay. So then I'm curious, like, this, you know, this has obviously been a unique year for everybody and certainly for startups. I think there's, you know, I mean, there's, I'm seeing from people I'm talking to, there's a, there's a lot of people, a lot more people starting businesses, but there's also those that are just getting going that are having challenges. Maybe you could just spend a minute or two when you're looking at your customer base, what are the biggest challenges that you're seeing with startups this year?

Yeah, I mean, I think April, May, and June were hard in startup land. You know, all of these, there was some financing happening, but it was very like mostly internal investors investing in their portfolio. I think You know, companies were not getting financed, there was a lot of uncertainty.

Right.

And then the market kind of bifurcated at that point between those things that, you know, often things that touch atoms like travel, but also things like hiring, like recruitment kind of really massively slowed down. So those startups were really hurt. But on the other side, like the startups that were kind of, you know, collaboration-focused, efficiency-focused, you know, save money-focused, right? If you think about a lot of things that the startups are trying to do. They actually aligned pretty well with this pandemic, particularly like the, you know, they were moving offline things online. So it turned out that actually the startup world kind of fared okay at the end of it.

Right.

You know, good for us as well, since we kind of are like, you know, how the macro startup world does is like impacts Mercury quite a bit. So that was one side of it. I mean, we do have also quite a few e-commerce companies that use us. And that was kind of interesting to watch because, you know, in February, China was not like shipping things because their factories were shut down and there was these major kind of supply issues. But ever since then, kind of especially in April, there's been an explosion in e-commerce and that's kind of been sustained. And we've seen that from kind of our numbers in terms of both people starting e-commerce companies, but also like the activity within like the existing companies we had.

Right, right. So then are you seeing like on the, for the brand new startups, are you, Have you, have you seen an acceleration this year that, uh, was, you know, more than expected?

Yeah, we were already on like a pretty strong growth trajectory. We're only a year and a half in, uh, right? It's hard to kind of overlay our growth trajectory with the underlying, underlying market. But yeah, in the last 3 months, I would say it's kind of mostly business as usual again. There is more difficulty. I think there's— I think the sector that's maybe been hit the worst is people who don't have too many connections to the Valley and like to investors here. I think, you know, if you're, if you're kind of completely out of the network, it's a little hard to network your way in when, you know, there's no in-person meetings, there's no networking events, there's, you know, a lot of these things that used to facilitate sometimes these initial introductions are gone. So I think that's probably the sector that's like, you know, the type of entrepreneur that's been like most kind of affected. But on the other side, we've, you know, the surprising thing is like we've even seen an emergence in like more emerging kind of seed and pre-seed investors, like whether it's the rolling funds or just kind of the normal funds kind of acting. So that's slight, you know, I think helped a little bit because there's more options available to these early-stage entrepreneurs.

Right, right. And speaking of which, you, you just recently launched, I think it was just earlier this month, a new initiative called Mercury Raise, which I thought was super interesting. Why don't you tell us about that? What was behind the launch of this new product?

Yeah. So the idea with Raise is we had a bunch of startups that started incorporation. They're with us from the start. And one of the biggest requests to us is like, especially since Mercury is fairly networked within investors, they're like, hey, can you introduce us to investors kind of thing? And yeah, we do it like on a one-off basis every now and then, but obviously we wanted to help in a broader way. So we decided to launch Mercury Raise. The idea is, you know, you as an entrepreneur, when you're ready to raise a seed round, you let us know, it's a relatively simple form to fill in. And then we collected together basically, you know, all the good kind of seed investors I could think of. And then once we launched it, we had a bunch of other seed investors that kind of applied and wanted to be part of it. So yeah, we're planning to run this I don't know, maybe once every 2 months or so. We haven't figured out the schedule, but basically we collect together all these great startups. We send it to investors. If an investor wants to talk to one of them, we make an introduction. So it's actually relatively lightweight, but, you know, we've got this network and I think it's like fairly impactful. So we just did a round. We had 460 startups.

Wow.

About 70% of them were already Mercury customers. You know, a few people— we also make it available to new people if they want to be part of it. And yeah, we sent it all out. We've already made a bit more than 100 introductions to investors. They're still kind of looking through it. It was obviously a lot of startups for all the investors to look through. So we're going to iterate that program and I'm very excited about it because I actually had this idea even before we started Mercury. It's just, yeah, we really want to be, not just say we are helpful, but we're—

Right.

kind of tangible things for people. And yeah, we can say we're helpful and try to be helpful, but like making these kind of tangible programs that like really deliver value, that's what it's about.

Right, right. So that brings me to another question that, you know, a lot of these startups, once, you know, once they get going, and obviously Silicon Valley Bank is renowned for this, is they also provide, you know, lending cap. Is that on your roadmap? I mean, I presume you're not doing that now, but what are you, What are your thoughts about providing loans to Mercury customers?

Yeah, it's not something we're doing now. It's definitely something we're thinking about. And there's a couple of ways to do it. Right now there's more and more kind of options for lending that is like non-traditional, but kind of, you know, maybe potentially more aligned with Mercury and our customers. Like it's more automated, it's faster, it's quicker kind of thing. Yeah, I don't want to name too many names, but like ClearBank, Pipe, there's a bunch of these kind of lending tools. You know, either we'll do it kind of like as a platform where we work with these appropriate companies, or we might do some of these things ourselves. So still early days as we're thinking about it. Obviously, as we continue growing, it becomes more and more relevant. The companies get to later stages, and also we just have more companies that ask for these things. So it's definitely on the radar. Yeah, we haven't done anything yet. Some, some of our customers do get loans from these people or even other banks and we help them where we can. And a lot of the time, even if we're not the loan provider, they'll continue using us. Right.

Well, as you mentioned, there is a thriving fintech ecosystem on the lending side for small business. I mean, you mentioned some of the names, but there's many, many others that I'm sure would love to partner with a company like yours to be the capital provider. So yeah, I think that would be a win-win. Okay. You said you've been in business 18 months, and can you give us some sense of the scale that you're at today?

Yeah. We don't release all of these numbers, but we have more than 10,000 businesses now using Mercury, still growing 10 to 15% a month. So obviously that makes it so we have to grow our capability in terms of customer service and all of these backend processes. At the same pace.

Right.

That's kind of the scale we're doing.

So then what about employees? I mean, you're based in San Francisco, right?

Well, you know, nowadays we have about 55 employees. We're pretty weird. Yeah. I don't think people love this, but we kind of in the long term, well, the medium term, we're going to have a hybrid kind of approach. So our 3 main offices are San Francisco, Portland, which is You know, mostly all of our kind of compliance and risk people. And then Toronto, where we have a few engineers and most of our support team. But really, we have, I think we have people in 12 states now. Altogether, we have 55 employees. Right, right.

And so, so you are, you are going to be growing that like nationally? It sounds like you're not, like you're not planning on keeping everyone hiring, hiring engineers just in the Bay Area?

Yeah, I think it depends partly on the role. I think with engineering, we're super distributed. There's very few engineers in San Francisco. With some other roles, for whatever reason, design, but also like BD and a few other things, support as well. Yeah, it's mostly been kind of concentrated in one of these hubs. And I still like the idea of kind of serendipitous kind of collaboration that happens in person. And the other thing that we quite like is like we don't, you know, one thing that people haven't talked about too much is I really want like the engineering team to be talking to the sales team, to be talking to—

Right.

The support team and like, you know, have these kind of cross connections that I think are harder to organize in a distributed world. Yeah. If these, I think if like people understand what everyone's roles are and like, you know, if someone gets stuck on something and they can just ask someone about it and it doesn't have to comes through like a top-down kind of management there. I think that really makes for a good culture where things are efficient and people enjoy working there. So yeah, I'm thinking about all of these things. I don't think anyone has great answers to all of them, but yeah, we're open to both and we're kind of doing both basically. Right, right.

So then what, I mean, I know you touched on this earlier, but I'm curious about like a product roadmap without giving away secrets. But where do you think you will be? Like, if you look at, looking at, say, next in 2021, are there certain milestones that you want to make sure that you have these particular features out next year?

Yeah. So I mean, like loosely speaking, I kind of think about like our product roadmap in like 3 pieces. There's number one, like what's the additional financial services we can add on top of a bank account? So for example, we added virtual cards in March and that's— I don't want to give away the thing here, but there's more we're adding. We should have a new announcement in November. It's just like quite a major kind of financial feature we're adding. Then part 2 is what are the business tools we can add on top of your bank account? So, you know, we've added an API in October and we're improving it. We have to kind of launch an Android app. I don't know which category that falls into, but we have an iOS app right now. So we're working on that. That's going to be a pretty big thing for us. We really want to add more of these kind of analytics we touched on to help you kind of understand your finances through your bank account, things like that. So that's part 2. And then part 3 is just kind of incrementally improving the things we have. And, you know, we have— I think every company does, but we have like this freaking huge kind of things that we want to do with like additional things. Yeah. Some of them are small, like this, you know, you click on a transaction, we want to give you more details, let you attach like invoices to a transaction, all that kind of stuff. And yeah, some of them a little bigger in terms of, yeah, we have a user permission system at which we're kind of continuously enhancing and making it so, especially as people request certain features, they're like, hey, and with user permissions, people request like almost any feature you can think of.

Right.

But if they're like, hey, I want to invite a user, but I only want them to do transactions up to $5,000 or something like that. So those types of things we still Yeah, we have some of them, but we want to continue kind of iterating and building them out.

So then, so last question before I let you go, you know, what's, what's your vision here? Are you— do you think one day that Mercury will have a banking license of itself and you're just going to be— you're going to be— have a national brand that everyone knows you're the small business or startup bank? I mean, what, what is the vision for Mercury?

I think, yeah, looking at it like 10 years out, I think it's inevitable that kind of the top 10 banks are going to be technology companies, whether it's going to be kind of existing banks kind of big, you know, learning and adapting to technology, or completely new players like us kind of being there. So that's inevitable. I think when that happens, you know, so far a lot of banks have existed as like regional players, if that makes sense. Like, you know, I'm the bank in Texas or whatever it is. I think the future is like these banks are going to be kind of verticalized players. It's going to be— people like Mercury that serve all of the US, but a particular industry within the US. So that's the future. And we want to be in those kind of, on the business side, at least we want to be the top kind of bank that serves all of these kind of digital businesses, which again, I think the future is that most businesses are going to be like digital first, if that makes sense. Even something like restaurants, like they're all going to you know, moving to POS systems and all these things that are digitized. So yeah, we want to be there and, you know, not just be like, here's the basic bank services, but kind of reimagine it to like, if a product-focused technology company was doing this, what are all the things you can build to make this kind of experience around your finances just really, really great, really like, yeah, really empowering you to succeed as an entrepreneur?

Right, right. Well, good luck. It sounds like it's going to be, you know, lots of— there'll be better experiences for entrepreneurs going forward. So that's a real positive. Anyway, Imad, I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Peter.

Okay. My pleasure. See ya. You know, talking with Imad, it came up many times during our conversation, particularly towards the end there. In my mind, I was reminded of the podcast I did with with Karen Mills, uh, back in 2019, episode 190. She— we were actually doing a review of her book that she had written. Karen Mills was the former head of the U.S. Small Business Administration under President Obama, and she writes in that book about small business utopia. And, you know, really talking about how, you know, fintech is coming along and providing all these things, all the information, all the, the sort of tools that a small business needs. And, you know, as I was sort of reconsidering that during Imad's conversation, I felt like that what's been missing has really been a bank that was really engaged, really, you know, sort of thinking about how they can help small business in a digital way and bringing fintech to small business banking. And I feel like that's what we've got here with Mercury. It's super interesting. And I think I agree with Imad when he says that, you know, the biggest banks in the world in 10 years' time are going to be really tech-enabled, tech-oriented banks. And obviously some of the large banks are doing a pretty good job here, but where I really appreciate what Amada's doing is it's rethinking what a small business bank account means, what it should do, what a small business bank should do. And I think that's what Karen Mills was talking about in Small Business Utopia, and I think where Amada's building something that really, I think, has tremendous potential and is going to be a great asset for the entrepreneur and for small businesses going forward. Anyway, on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate you listening, and I'll catch you next time. Bye. Today's episode was sponsored by LendIt Fintech Digital, the new online community for financial services innovators. Today's challenges are extraordinary, with the upheaval affecting all areas of More than ever before, we need to come together as an industry to learn from each other and make sense of this new world. Join Lendit Fintech Digital to connect and learn all year long from your peers and from the fintech experts. Sign up today at digital.lendit.com.