The Fintech Blueprint · 2026-04-27 · 45 min
In this episode, Lex chats with Immad Akhund, CEO and founder of Mercury, a leading neobank for businesses. Immad shares his entrepreneurial journey, explaining how frustrating banking experiences inspired Mercury's creation. They discuss Banking as a Service, open banking, embedded finance, and core banking systems. Immad details Mercury's product philosophy, team structure, and migration away from Synapse before its collapse. He also outlines Mercury's impressive growth, with 300,000 customers, $650M in annual revenue, and three years of profitability. The conversation concludes with Mercury's future plans, including lending expansion, a bank charter application, and hopes for smarter AI-driven regulatory compliance. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: Banking-as-a-Service Has Been Completely Restructured - and the Original Model Is Dead: The fintech BaaS layer that enabled the 2019 - 2021 neobank boom - middleware providers like Synapse, Unit, and Bond sitting between fintechs and partner banks - has effectively collapsed. The replacement model is banks themselves exposing modern APIs directly, with Column Bank and Lead Bank emerging as the new infrastructure layer.
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