How we reinvented Mercury Treasury

Every business has money it needs now, money it needs next quarter, and money it may not touch for years. But traditional investment portfolios treat that cash as percentages on a pie chart, not as months of operating expenses.

We thought there was a smarter way.

Today we’re introducing a reinvented Mercury Treasury experience built around how your business actually spends. It combines personalized investment recommendations with U.S. Treasury bond ladders to help you pursue more yield on cash you won’t need until later, while keeping funds accessible for nearer-term expenses. And your portfolio adapts as your business spends, so you’re maximizing your yield with less work.

For decades, every investment portfolio asked the same thing: how do you want your money allocated? Sixty percent here, forty percent there, ten percent elsewhere. That tells you where your money sits, but little about what it’s there to do. And while that’s a reasonable tool for some investors, it’s the wrong one for a business or founder.

Investors allocate against risk and a horizon measured in years or decades, but businesses have payroll this Friday, a tax payment next quarter, and a new hire might start next month. The cash sitting in your portfolio has a job to do at each of those moments. So instead of asking businesses to think like investors, we rebuilt the portfolio to think more like a business.

Founders, operators, and finance leaders think in months: months they have covered, months of runway, months until the next raise. It’s the unit that shows up in the board deck, in the hiring plan, in the decision about whether to sign a longer lease.

Starting today, your monthly cash outflows become the foundation of your investment strategy. You tell Mercury Treasury what your business spends in a typical month, across all of your accounts, then you tell it how much you’re investing and choose an objective.

From there, Mercury Advisory’s investment engine builds a custom portfolio for you across three investments:

• Near-term cash: A government money market fund, MRGXX, designed for money you need the soonest, with same-day access.
• Cash in reserve: An ultra-short bond fund, MCRYX, for money you expect to need further out, with access typically taking one to two business days.
• Longer-term cash: Everything beyond, on a ladder of U.S. Treasury securities with a rung maturing each month.

A ladder is a series of bonds that mature on a regular schedule. If your portfolio includes a ladder, we find and buy U.S. Treasuries that fit your timeline, then build your ladder with bonds that mature monthly.

As you use your near-term cash, your portfolio automatically replenishes it with proceeds from maturing bonds, drawing from your reserves when needed. If your near-term cash and reserves are covered, maturing bonds can be reinvested into the ladder to keep the rest of your money working toward higher yields. And if you need to access cash in the ladder before a bond matures, the portfolio prioritizes selling bonds closest to maturity, helping preserve longer-term investments.

The result: Your portfolio keeps pace with your business, maintaining near-term liquidity while pursuing more yield on cash you don’t need for a while, without any manual rebalancing required.

In addition to recommendations, the redesigned Treasury experience gives you presets to choose from. Need more liquidity? You can keep all your funds same-day liquid. Want a 36-month ladder instead of 12? You get full flexibility to customize your portfolio and allocate your cash between the investments. And if you want to end your ladder, you have control over whether you sell all the rungs at once (before maturity) or let them mature over time and reinvest the money in mutual funds.

Mercury Advisory carries a fiduciary duty to clients. Our philosophy is capital preservation first, then liquidity, then yield, in that order every time. The Mercury-exclusive mutual funds follow the same conservative strategies they always have, and the ladder holds U.S. Treasury securities, the gold standard for low risk investments. These aren’t BBB-rated bonds or mortgage-backed securities. Additional return comes when you’ll actually need the money, not from taking on risk you didn’t ask for.

When you open Mercury Treasury, the first thing you’ll see won’t be a pie chart of percentages. It will be your portfolio, denominated in months, the same language as your business. It’s a snapshot you can take into a board meeting without doing layers of arithmetic first because your treasury and your business are finally measured in the same unit.

Mercury Treasury is available to companies holding $250,000 or more across their Mercury accounts. You can apply and read more at mercury.com/treasury.

If you already use Mercury Treasury, visit your Treasury dashboard to enter your monthly outflows. We’ll recommend a portfolio based in months of cash outflows, and you can adjust it to fit your business.