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Why I built banking for America's startups — then rebuilt it around AI
Immad Akhund, Co-Founder & CEO at Mercury, joins NEW ECONOMIES on banking one in three U.S. startups, raising $200M without needing a dollar of it, and why the legacy banking system was never going to win.
In this episode, we discuss Mercury’s origin story — launched in 2019 when the entire industry told founders that nobody would trust a startup with their money — and how a million-dollar deposit arrived within four days of launch from someone Immad had never spoken to. We dig into why incumbent banks were always going to lose this fight, why AI makes their position ten times worse, and how Mercury is now rebuilding its entire product around the idea that your bank should live inside whatever AI tool you already use.
We also explore why Immad dropped all one-on-ones after watching Jensen Huang run NVIDIA with 60 direct reports, the Amazon “working backwards” process that mapped out Mercury’s entire AI roadmap from a single doc, and why the fintech companies that planted seeds in 2017 are only now bearing fruit.
Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify
Download the full transcript:
Timestamps
(0:00) Immad Akhund
(2:35) Why Raise $200M?
(3:55) Why FinTech Is Having a Moment
(6:02) How Has AI Impacted Mercury?
(10:25) What Is Defensibility Today?
(13:29) Mercury Finding Product-Market Fit
(15:22) Legacy Banks Never Caught Up
(19:22) Inside Mercury's Product Team
(23:56) The Nuclear Power of Talent
(26:05) Is AI Moving Too Fast?
(29:00) Keeping Up-to-Date with AI
(31:20) Ollie Joining Immad as Chief of Staff
(33:45) Our Latest Product Features
(35:45) Immad's Interest in Angel Investing
(38:20) Today's Underappreciated Opportunities
(40:36) AI Wrappers: Will They Last?
(42:34) Why Is Consumer So Hard?
(44:17) Immad's Quick-Fire Round
Our notes from this conversation
1. Raise when you don’t need to — and the terms will show it
Mercury has been profitable for four years. That single fact changed everything about the Series D. When you’re not desperate, you get to choose your investors, your timing, and your narrative. Immad has watched enough founders raise under duress to know the difference — and deliberately built Mercury to a position where fundraising is a strategic move, not a survival one. The best negotiating leverage is not needing the deal.
2. Legacy banks lost because their incentives were always wrong
Deposit banking is a cost center for incumbent banks. Their real product is loans. That single structural fact explains almost everything: why they underinvest in product, why they charge fees instead of building features, why their “engineering” teams are actually IT teams stitching together third-party vendors. They weren’t slow to adapt — they were optimized for something else entirely. Mercury was always competing on a different game board.
3. Trust isn’t a brand asset. It’s an infrastructure layer.
Within four days of launch, someone Immad had never spoken to wired a million dollars into a Mercury account. That moment signaled something real — but it took seven more years to get customers holding $400M in their accounts. Trust compounds slowly and is almost impossible to manufacture quickly. It’s also, eventually, one of the most durable moats in financial services. The product is the interface. The trust is the product.
4. AI made the incumbent problem ten times worse
If legacy banks couldn’t keep up with Mercury’s pace over the last decade, they have no chance now. The window for meaningful product decisions has shrunk from years to months. Launching an MCP integration, shipping an AI-native feature, rebuilding a workflow around an agent — these are things Mercury can do in weeks. A bank operating on a core banking vendor’s release cycle cannot. The faster the world moves, the more permanently the gap widens.
5. The paradigm shifts every six months — that’s the feature, not the bug
A year ago, nobody was seriously talking about agents living on your machine and connecting to every service you use. Now it’s Mercury’s central product thesis. Immad isn’t trying to predict which paradigm comes next — he’s building an organisation that can absorb the shift when it arrives. Curiosity and optimism aren’t soft skills. They’re survival mechanisms for operating in an environment where the rules rewrite themselves annually.
Links
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Try Mercury Insights (https://mercury.com/insights)
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