Challenge

Mercury was founded in 2017 to provide innovative digital banking services to startups. The traditional banking industry—with its reliance on in-person interactions and lack of online integrations—wasn’t keeping up with the needs of these fast-moving, technology-driven customers. So Mercury set out to build a product centered around an online bank account with an intuitive user interface and powerful tools to streamline basic banking tasks like money transfers. Over the years, Mercury added more features and products to its platform, including corporate credit cards, treasury tools, and financial software to help customers streamline and automate their finances.

As customers began managing more of their banking and finance operations on Mercury, the company saw the opportunity to add another useful service to their offerings: online invoicing.

“Startups want a streamlined way to manage their finances. They don’t want to use five tools to manage what should be one process,” said Katka Opocenska, product manager for Mercury Invoicing. “As a fintech with checking accounts, we were uniquely positioned to combine the invoicing and payment reconciliation workflows in a seamless experience.”

Mercury’s development team could build most of the invoicing solution in-house. But to make the invoicing and collections workflow a completely digital experience, Mercury needed a partner to process online payments.

Finding a partner with a trusted brand and a track record of innovation among the startup community was a top priority to maintain Mercury’s reputation as a digital-first banking platform that was continually adding new features to meet the needs of its core customer base as those companies grew. That partner would also need proven technology that was easy to integrate into Mercury and that could scale with Mercury’s growth.

Through its banking relationships, Mercury could facilitate invoice payments via ACH and wire transfers. But to enhance the customer experience, the company wanted a payments provider that could process additional payment methods that Mercury users needed to make collecting invoice payments from their own customers easier and faster, such as credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets.

Solution

In 2024, Mercury selected Stripe as the payment partner for Mercury Invoicing. The company implemented Stripe Connect to facilitate the movement of funds collected from invoice payments to Mercury users and implemented Stripe Payments to process invoice payments made through cards and digital wallets.

Stripe’s reputation for providing developer-friendly payment technology and its brand profile among the startup community were key factors that influenced Mercury’s decision. “Many of our customers are already familiar with Stripe, so it felt natural and seamless for us to choose Stripe as a partner,” said Opocenska.

Mercury chose to integrate Connect in a way that accelerated time-to-market and that required fewer resources from its engineering team, which was busy developing other features of the invoicing solution. For example, Mercury selected Stripe-hosted onboarding for users signing up for Mercury payments. That onboarding flow allowed Stripe to link that user to an existing Stripe login if the user already had one, or to create a new account for first-time Stripe users.

The Mercury team built its own invoice-generating program into the platform and designed the card payment option using Stripe Elements, a set of embeddable UI components. Choosing the Payment Element enabled Mercury to maintain a consistent look and feel for the end customer. With the Payment Element, users can accept credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, in addition to ACH or wire transfers enabled by Mercury. The global functionality of Stripe also means that Mercury users can accept international cards from customers outside the US.

As a fully integrated service within the Mercury platform, the invoicing solution allows users to generate, send, and track invoices from their Mercury account. When an invoice is paid by a card, the money flows through the user’s Stripe account and is automatically distributed to their Mercury bank account within days. The payment data from Stripe allows Mercury to track all money movements across the platform, which means that users logging in to their Mercury account can see when an invoice has been paid, providing an accurate real-time view of accounts receivable.

Results

Three weeks to build and launch Mercury Invoicing beta

Adopting Connect and choosing Stripe-hosted onboarding accelerated Mercury’s go-to-market time. After gaining access to Connect, the Mercury team was able to test its integration within one week, and then meet its deadline for a beta launch within a few weeks. Stripe-hosted onboarding, which presents a dynamically adjusted web form based on account capabilities, business type, and country, allowed beta users to complete the process in a few minutes, ensuring that Mercury could quickly test the new solution in the market.

Following that successful beta, Mercury was able to launch its invoicing solution to all users in August 2024.

The integrated invoicing solution proved immediately popular with Mercury users. “The launch has been super strong and definitely exceeded our expectations,” said Opocenska.

Easy addition of nonbank payment methods accelerates invoice payments

The ease of integrating the Payment Element into Mercury Invoicing allowed the company to launch with multiple payment methods enabled. Card payments account for approximately 80% of invoice payments processed through Stripe, with digital wallets representing the remaining 20%. By accepting credit cards and digital wallets, Mercury users can offer an easier invoice payment experience that results in faster collections for outstanding payments.

“The benefits come not just from faster payments, but from the ability to create invoices faster and easily track those payments,” said Opocenska. “We’ve taken what used to be a manual process for a lot of customers and created a tool that basically does everything for them.”

Stripe technology provides a foundation for future upgrades

“This is just the beginning, and I’m excited to see where we can take it in the next few years as we build a really robust accounts receivable solution for startups,” said Opocenska.

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust®; Members FDIC.