Mercury reposted this
This was one of those weeks that is hard as a founder, and it was harder on some of our customers. We made the difficult decision to add to the list of countries Mercury can’t support if founders reside or their businesses are headquartered there, including: Ukraine, Nigeria, Pakistan, Croatia, and the Philippines. Impacted customers were notified on Monday that they would be offboarded. To give more context: the number of customers in these countries is very small (<1% of Mercury deposits), but it was putting a lot of strain on our operational teams and all of our financial partners (partner banks, treasury, payments, etc). We’ve seen the regulatory environment become stricter recently, which has made us change our approach to certain situations. Ukraine in particular was a tough one. There are a lot of great startups in Ukraine, but about 20% of Ukraine is sanctioned. Verifying and monitoring which part of a country someone lives in to a high standard becomes highly complex at scale and the penalty for making even one mistake is large. While this week’s decision was hard, we also know that this is a decision which will help Mercury move our compliance program forward and enable us to better support founders in these regions in the future. As an immigrant from Pakistan myself, I have a lot of empathy for international founders and sincerely apologize to the founders impacted by this decision. While we aim to eventually solve all complex problems related to banking, this is unfortunately not one we can solve overnight. We will continue to revisit this policy and hope that we can change this in the future.