Mercury CEO & Founder: How to Build a Bank People Actually Like | Immad Akhund
Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury, explains how he built a banking platform startups actually like and what gives fintech companies lasting advantages over traditional banks.
The gist
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Traditional banks earn 80 to 90 percent of revenue from lending, so their deposit and payments products get little attention and stay broken for entrepreneurs.
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Mercury launched with a tight feature set, cards, wires, and multi-user access, then relied on early adopters who were frustrated enough to spread the word.
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A full demo at demo.mercury.com using fake money improved signup-to-activation rates by 30 to 40 percent by letting people try before committing.
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As software gets cheaper to build, durable advantages shift to brand trust, bank charters, and distribution rather than engineering.
What they recommend · 2 picks
"Ben Horowitz has a great book on it — 'Who You Are Is What You Do,' I think is what it's called. That's probably like the best culture book I have read."
House of Morgan
Books
"Relatively early when I started Mercury I read this book called House of Morgan, which is all about JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley — all comes from him. For a long time there's th..."
Made by someone on this episode
Mercury Command
· Immad Akhund's
— A conversational AI interface built directly into Mercury banking t...
Also mentioned
1:01
Mercury
· "I've always thought of Mercury as like the thing you come to if you don't want to talk to people because..."
13:45
AWS
· "Or I don't even — it was AWS then? I don't think there was AWS. I remember we used to do like bare metal..."
18:45
Mercury Books
· "We just launched Mercury Books, which is kind of an extension on that. Accounting systems suck. As an..."
Ads in this episode
Notion, Claude. They're paid, so we keep them out of the picks above.
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