I Picked Mercury for the Business. A Week Later I Moved My Personal Banking There Too.

The day after the LLC was formed I opened its bank account. I run brokerage operations for a living, so I had opinions going in. Mercury still won, and then it did something I didn't expect: it made me look hard at my own personal setup and admit it was a mess.

Why Mercury for the LLC

The shortlist for a solo LLC is short: Mercury, Relay, or a big bank with branches. I wanted three things.

• Fast, boring onboarding. Articles of organization, EIN letter, signed operating agreement, ID. Approved quickly, no branch visit, no "come back with a notarized resolution."
• Free, with real rails. No monthly fee. ACH and wires built in. Checking plus a savings account I can use to set aside tax money the moment revenue starts.
• Something my tools can read. Mercury has a read-only connector Claude can use — accounts, transactions, cards, statements. It can't move money, which is exactly the permission I want it to have. This means my monthly bookkeeping is "reconcile the ledger against the bank feed," not "log into a portal and retype."

Cards, too. A physical card arrived; virtual cards exist for every subscription I want to move off my personal Visa. Categorization and rules are built in, and I'll take built-in over bolted-on every time at this size.

The bank you want is the one your bookkeeping can talk to. Everything else is a branch you'll never visit.

The honest caveats

Mercury is a fintech, not a bank. Deposits sit at partner banks and get FDIC coverage through a sweep arrangement. For a consultancy with a few thousand dollars in it, that's fine; know what you're signing up for. No branches, so no cash deposits — irrelevant for me. And the first funding transfer, a capital contribution from my personal checking, sat pending for several days. Normal ACH, but if you're expecting the account to be live the same afternoon, it won't be.

Then I looked at my own accounts

Here's where it got uncomfortable. My personal money movement had grown, over years, into a small Rube Goldberg machine: a brokerage account pulled a standing monthly transfer from a bank account, then sent a standing wire to my landlord. Three institutions, two hops, and a rent payment I couldn't easily change without a phone call to a human.

It worked. It also meant nobody — including me — could look at one screen and understand where my money went.

Setting up the business account made the contrast obvious. Clarent had one account, one card, one feed, and I could see everything. My personal finances had five logins and a wire I'd forgotten was automated.

So I moved

I opened a personal account at Mercury as well and consolidated the operational money movement there. Rent goes out as a direct transfer from the account it comes from. The standing pull and the standing wire at the brokerage got cancelled. The brokerage goes back to being a brokerage.

The principle, which I should have applied years ago: prefer simple, direct rails over clever multi-bank workarounds. Every hop is a place something breaks silently, and every extra institution is a login you'll forget about.

A few things I deliberately did not do: I didn't close my other accounts, I didn't move investments, and I didn't put everything in one place for its own sake. This was about the plumbing — the recurring, operational stuff — not a wholesale switch.

What this changes for the business

Every business expense now runs through Mercury, full stop. No more personal cards for business costs. That's the single most important habit for a single-member LLC, because commingling is the most common way people quietly lose the liability protection they just paid to set up.

If you're choosing a business bank right now, tell me what you're weighing and I'll give you my honest read. And if you've done a personal banking cleanup like this, I'd like to know what surprised you — mine was how long I'd tolerated the mess.