Mercury Vault: protect your cash with a money market fund and up to $5M in FDIC insurance

Today we’re introducing Mercury Vault, which offers startups of any size and scale a simple way to manage bank risk and protect every dollar they have. In addition to securing additional FDIC insurance for our customers — up to $5M, 20x the per bank limit, available through our partner banks' sweep networks

¹ — Mercury Vault makes it simple to move uninsured cash into a money market fund predominantly composed of short-term, U.S. government-backed T-bills. All Mercury accounts are armed with Vault by default — just follow the personalized suggestions in your dashboard to maximize the protection of your funds.

The last several days have been challenging for many throughout the startup ecosystem and we’re committed to delivering stability at this time. Our top priority is providing startups with accounts that offer maximal protection of their funds and diversification across financial institutions to reduce the risk of any single point of failure. Because Mercury is not a bank and does not hold customer funds directly, we are in a unique position to provide protection and peace of mind.

Here’s how Mercury Vault works:

Protection beyond FDIC insurance with money market funds

With Mercury Vault, customers with more than $5M in their accounts can protect their uninsured funds by moving them to Mercury Treasury accounts.

² Mercury Treasury accounts allow you to invest your money into a Vanguard money market fund, which is predominantly composed of U.S. government-backed treasury products. These lower-risk, short-term investments ensure that customers have protection of their money — beyond any FDIC insurance amount, at any deposit size — secured by the U.S. government.

Mercury Treasury accounts are held in an account in your name at our partner Apex Clearing Corp, a FINRA-regulated broker-dealer. As a broker-dealer, Apex is prohibited from using customer funds or securities for its own purposes or even from commingling those funds/securities with its own. In the unlikely event that Mercury or its diversified network of partner banks suffers liquidity risk, your funds would be fully safeguarded at Apex. In the even more unlikely event that Apex was to fail, your funds would simply be transferred to another broker-dealer. What this means is that regardless of what happens at your bank, funds/securities held at Apex will remain safe and accessible.

Up to $5M in FDIC insurance

Through our partner banks, Mercury Vault provides access to a sweep network of trusted banks (see the two lists of our partner banks' sweep network banks under Evolve Documents and Choice Documents on our Legal page). This sweep network provides up to $5M in FDIC insurance by automatically spreading a customer’s deposits across up to 20 different banks, without requiring users to open and manage separate bank accounts. Mercury users can check the status of their FDIC insurance and opt into the sweep network as needed on the Vault page within their Mercury dashboard.

It is abundantly clear that $250K FDIC insurance is not enough for startups, who need peace of mind that cash for short-term operations and payroll is secured. We previously offered $1M in FDIC insurance (4x the industry standard), and have worked with our partners to quickly extend that amount to $5M (20x the per bank limit). We’re actively working to expand this coverage even further in the coming weeks.

Real-time insight into the extent that your cash is protected

Right now, startups need a clear understanding of how their money is protected and what simple actions they can take to reduce their risk. Mercury Vault will continuously monitor cash across a customer’s Mercury accounts and suggest actions they can take to keep every dollar as secure as possible. These actions might include opting into the sweep network offered by our partner banks, shifting cash to a secure and diversified Mercury Treasury account, or additional security measures we plan to make available to our customers soon. All the while, Mercury keeps customers in control by organizing all of their accounts within their Mercury dashboard, offering them a simplified, bird’s-eye view of all funds.

In pursuit of helping our customers protect every dollar they have, we’re continuously working on expanding these and other existing offerings.

Mercury is not a bank; we are a technology company that works with partner banks to provide access to the banking services our customers require — without the constraints and risks associated with reliance on any single financial institution. We've invested the time to add additional layers of compliance and security (including everything from sweep networks that increase FDIC insurance to encryption protocols on account, data, and card information), and modernizing the banking experience (through features like transparent payments, automated money transfer rules, and integrations with accounting software like QuickBooks). And, we deliver all of this in the form of one convenient, easy-to-use account. Here is a more in-depth view of how Mercury works.