Mercury clears a second regulatory hurdle toward becoming a chartered bank

Mercury, the banking platform built primarily for startups and small businesses, received conditional approval for FDIC deposit insurance on September 8, 2026, according to reporting this month — a second regulatory milestone following the conditional national bank charter approval it received from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in April. Mercury now serves more than 300,000 business customers and was valued at $5.2 billion following a $200 million Series D round led by TCV in May 2026.

Like Revolut’s pending US charter application, Mercury’s path to becoming a directly chartered bank runs through multiple federal approvals rather than a single decision, and conditional approval from both the OCC and now the FDIC moves it further along that path than most fintech banking platforms have gotten. Mercury has operated to date through partner banks holding customer deposits, a common structure for fintechs offering banking-like products without a charter of their own — one that carries the risk, illustrated by other firms’ past partner-bank failures across the industry, of disruption if a partner bank runs into trouble. A direct charter would let Mercury hold deposits itself.

Beyond the charter news, Mercury has been expanding its product set in ways aimed at deepening its relationship with startup customers who keep meaningful cash balances on the platform. It launched two proprietary investment funds, MCRYX and MRGXX, giving treasury-management customers a way to earn yield on idle cash without leaving Mercury’s platform, and introduced virtual credit cards specifically designed for use by AI agents — a forward-looking bet that software agents making autonomous purchases on a business’s behalf will need their own spending controls and card infrastructure.

Mercury competes for startup banking relationships against players like Brex and traditional venture-focused banks, and a full bank charter — if it clears its remaining approvals — would let it compete on deposit stability and product breadth in a way partner-bank arrangements cannot fully match. The conditional nature of both approvals means Mercury still needs to satisfy final regulatory requirements before the charter is complete, but reaching this stage after the 2023 partner-bank turmoil that shook confidence in the broader fintech-banking model is a notable step for a company built on exactly that model.