101 points by cbisnett 8 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments
We’ve been using Silicon Valley Bank for the last 4 years and while their services generally “work”, they aren’t the best. We’ve been working with SVB to setup a line-of-credit just to have in case we need it, and we recently talked with them about their Innovators card. Unfortunately their sales people cannot show you any kind of demo so that you can see how it works or what the UI looks like even. This is a tough ask as the only way to see it is to sign up for an account and start issuing cards. We also talked with Brex about their solution and even looked into Expensify’s card.
Brex was able to show us a demo and as part of the trial we attached our SVB account which causes a $0.01 deposit and withdrawal. After doing this we received an email from our SVB sales rep acknowledging the transaction: “It looks like I see a penny test from Brex on June 3rd so it may be that you just set something up.” I’m not sure what’s buried in the SVB ToS, but SVB sales reps looking into our transactions didn’t sit quite right with me. Then we told them that we decided to go with Brex because we liked the solution and not being able to get a demo from SVB made it basically a non-starter. A couple days later we get a call from a Managing Director and he tells us that the line-of-credit will need to be venture debt and backed by equity or warrants, which we’re not interested in since this is only a rainy-day LoC and we’ve got plenty of money in our SVB account. Fast forward to today and they tell us that they won’t give us the LoC anymore unless we also agree to use their Innovator card.
Basically I’m looking for other banks that are great to work with and understand how startups work and the needs they have. I’ve looked at Mercury, and we have an account there, but I was hesitant to move too much away from SVB because it “just worked”, but obviously now I’m reconsidering. Hopefully HackerNews has some good advice and recommendations.
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