01:31:00 · Immad Akhund
[01:31:00] S5: I I think for us it's like do both. So we're building both kind of the CLI and we we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and Yeah. Those those services. But we also have another team that's working on and we just launched Mercury Insights which, know, summarizes your transactions, gives you like kind of AI insights on end, lets you talk to your transactions. Then later this year, we're launching Mercury Command where you can do kind of complex workflows like, hey, I just hired someone, set them up in payroll and create a card and do all of that without me having to kind of click around all the kind of mercury surfaces. And I think number one, I don't know exactly where the world is going to go. Right? Like, maybe maybe everyone is going to be using AI assistance to do everything or it's going to be a combination. So we want to service both of it. And b, you know, if you think about like the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, yeah, even whether it's like a mobile app or like searching for all your transactions, whatever it is, you know, Mercury has been far ahead. But if AI keeps changing the world and, like, you know, the people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we want to be at the forefront of that and, you know, that's gonna increase the spread between, like, what people get from Mercury versus, like, what they get from the incumbents.
01:32:12 · John Coogan, Immad Akhund, Jordi Hays
[01:32:12] S0: Yeah. I was reading an article in The Economist a couple weeks ago about stablecoins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or like a maybe just a, you know, stable volumes through the earlier part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stablecoin related features in fintech broadly? [01:32:38] S5: Yeah. I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. Mhmm. I think if you're in The US and you're sending money to a US business or you can US consumer, you know, why is ACH all of the cards, all of that works pretty smoothly. Yeah. If you're paying money internationally or, you know, you don't you're in The US and you want to have like a stable currency Mhmm. That's where USDC and these other stablecoins are doing really well. So, you know, we don't currently support it natively, but lots of our customers use, you some know, of these kind of Stablecoin services. And we'll probably have kind of at least payment features that are based on Stablecoin, especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for The US banking system in The US. I think it's it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer. [01:33:23] S0: Is oh, sorry, George. [01:33:24] S1: Why why was this year the right time to get into payroll?
01:33:24 · Jordi Hays, Immad Akhund
[01:33:24] S1: Why why was this year the right time to get into payroll? [01:33:32] S5: You know, we've been expanding our services. So obviously, we're known best for banking, but we've had a corporate credit card for three years and that's growing really fast. We have a bill pay and invoicing solution. And, you know, over time, I really want Mercury to be the place that you do most of your business finances. Right? It's kind of annoying. Like, if if the money is here and your users are here and your finance team is here, you know, you want to have all of that kind of in in one place. So, yeah, we made an acquisition in payroll. We acquired a company called Central. They're running you know, we're continuing to run them, and we're gonna gonna over time make it more like a fully integrated Mercury payroll solution. But, yeah, payroll is like a big category. You know, it's kind of annoying right now when you're using a payroll provider. You have to send money. It's kind of sits around for four days before it shows up on your employees. And, you know, Central has done a really good job with kind of AI first. Like, they have this whole interface where you can do a ton of things in Slack and, you know, we're we're kind of taking some of that learning and and putting in our own kinda command launch.
01:34:32 · John Coogan
[01:34:32] S0: Yeah. Is is the AI boom helping you sort of rethink product road map expansion differently than a few years ago? Like, when I think about neo banks, fintech, modern technology enabled banks, I I think like you could eventually do auto loans, mortgages, consumer. You could do all sorts of the insurance. There's so many different products in the financial technology world. I know that there's incredible value to focus. At the same time, there's this foundational unlock in being able to move very quickly into new markets. How are you wrestling with that tension?
01:35:13 · Immad Akhund
[01:35:13] S5: I think, number one, we want to talk to our customers and see what they really want. I don't want to invent things that they might want kind of thing. It's definitely accelerating. I think the two vectors are like, a, it accelerates software development. It doesn't necessarily make like kind of the more financial like it doesn't make lending that much better, faster or whatever. Maybe you could underwrite a little better, but there's still kind of limitations. But you can build software, especially new software, much quicker. So definitely thinking about that and like we're already seeing an acceleration in kind of new software launches we're doing. I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is interfaces tend to get cluttered over time, but AI has a decluttering effect. Like you can kind of personalize it to someone's need. And like, I really think the future is people are not trying to do a specific thing, but they kind of just talk about a problem. They're like, hey, I just need to make payroll, like, you know, help me think it through kind of thing. So you can go like a level above, like solve the problem rather than like be like a feature Mhmm. Which I think like has a decluttering effect to interfaces.
01:36:17 · Jordi Hays, Immad Akhund
[01:36:17] S1: That's good. Yeah. It's so it's so amazing. I just think back to, you know, 10 ago at this point like starting to to build companies and just seeing how many things I expected to be intuitive. Like I expected my bank to be able to help me pay my employees because like the function of a bank is to like Yeah. Hold money and let you do things with it and yet, obviously, you know, it took took some time for you guys to enter payroll and then all these all these other things like just just the concept of getting getting an invoice, wanting to pay it, like you really should be this simple as like dragging it somewhere and then that's it. Yeah. Right? And so there's all these things that like right in this moment, there's gonna be an entire generation of entrepreneurs that like only knows this like completely frictionless business finance and I'm very happy for them. Yeah. And I'm happy for all of us that that had to go through do it the hard way for for so long. [01:37:14] S5: Yeah. When I started Mercury, that's actually got what got me excited that like after you build a bank account, there's so much more to do after that. You know, I really didn't wanna this is my fourth company, so I really didn't wanna do like this thing where you build a thing and then all you do is like incrementally improve it a little bit over like a decade. Like I really wanted to do something where like the start is just the start and it's kind of a platform to build a lot. So I'm exciting excited that we're like finally like getting to build build that kind of multi product strategy.