In 2018, business banking was fragmented and broken. A regulatory shift enabled sponsor banking, letting fintech firms partner with banks, a model Chime had already proven at scale. This opened the door for companies like Rho and Mercury to rebuild business finance from scratch.
At the time, you couldn't open a business bank account online. There were no next-generation credit cards, really. And running a business— small business, big business, didn't matter— meant cobbling together a lot of different tools that really didn't talk to each other very well. And so what I kept asking myself was, like, why is it this way? And really, after a couple of months of thinking about that, what I really uncovered was, well, it's a hard problem to fix. And nobody, at the time anyway, had really tried. or had really tried it in a serious way. And there was a third answer, which was there was a really clear why now. The regulatory environment had shifted. The notion of sponsor banking, of technology companies partnering with banks to deliver solutions to the market, had been proven out by the consumer companies like Chime at a really large scale. And that hadn't happened before. And so there was this window where you could see the market shifting. And we weren't the only people that saw this. Folks like Mercury and other people started around the same time. But you could see that there was a new way to do things, that there was a new opportunity. And as a result, you could be a technology company and truly build tools and products that fundamentally shifted the way that business finances were operated. And so that was 2018. We're 6 years later. We're still very early in our journey. But it's an exciting problem to solve. And it's amazing to work with awesome entrepreneurs.
