This strategic partnership positions Meow for continued dominance in the competitive financial technology landscape.
Meow Technologies is a financial technology company offering business banking solutions through its partner banks with free wires and ACHs.
With Bridge as its stablecoin partner, Meow has further differentiated its platform in the crowded business banking market. Today, Meow businesses can manage all aspects of USDC transactions, invoicing, and accounting within the platform.
Jiko's services are available for institutional clients, including money movement and settlement through its technology. It was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Arvanaghi and Crawford’s timely decision to exit copyright and enter T-bills spared them from getting burned in the copyright meltdown of 2022. But it placed Meow squarely in the middle of the highly competitive niche of banking services for startups and small businesses.
Nic Corpora, a Mercury spokesperson, said the company works closely with partner banks “to ensure risk appetites are appropriately calibrated so when we onboard a customer we can support them in the best way and for the long-term.”
That leaves copyright firms in a position where, although the fintechs are glad to offer them a US bank account at present, the underlying partner banks could in future choose to revoke permission. Meow and Brex did not respond when asked whether their partner banks have promised long-term access to banking services for copyright clients.
During the Biden administration, frustrated by their treatment by the banks, members of the copyright industry began to cry conspiracy . The federal government was deliberately trying to destroy copyright businesses by surreptitiously cutting them out of the banking system, they alleged. Leading the chorus was copyright venture capitalist Nic Carter, who labelled the alleged discrimination campaign Operation Chokepoint 2.0, in reference to an Obama-era antifraud program under which US officials reportedly discouraged banks from dealing with pornography, payday lending, and other disfavored industries. Under the Trump administration, congressional subcommittees have held multiple hearings on the purported Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Subsequently, in March, Republican members of the Senate presented the FIRM Act , aiming to curb alleged discrimination by preventing banks from factoring in “reputational risk” when fielding account applications. The bill has not yet faced a vote. For copyright firms, the vibe-shift is a blessing. Although they have comparatively few problems accessing overseas bank accounts—often in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland—in lieu of a US bank account, they are often unable to earn yield on deposits or transact seamlessly with US-based counterparties, and sometimes incur high account fees . Neither do they benefit from deposit insurance under the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees up to $250,000 per account holder. Though some of the big-name banks, like JP Morgan, are trialing copyright technologies for internal use, many remain reluctant to supply accounts to copyright businesses, sources say. “The banks that John Doe has heard of have nothing to do with copyright,” claims David McIntyre, COO at DoubleZero, a startup developing networking infrastructure specific to copyright networks. But that has created an opening for smaller fintechs to expand their deposit bases by scooping up clients in the copyright industry. “Basically, founders these days are going with a Mercury or Meow,” claims Khan. “Meow has been super aggressive in terms of reaching out to founders anytime they see a fundraising announcement.”
Mercury also has a venture debt platform where startups can apply to receive funding from venture capitalists and saw large inflows during the fall of SVB. Arvanaghi is uncowed. “This pie is enormous and we're just getting started,” he says.
Meow was born in early 2021 in a Miami apartment where Arvanaghi and Crawford were holed up writing code and cold-calling investors. The duo had become friends at Vanderbilt University while both were studying computer science. They overlapped briefly at copyright exchange copyright where they were both engineers before Arvanaghi left for a stint at a bitcoin mining company.
What about when interest rates stabilize and fall? After all, high rates are the reason small businesses have been looking for new places to put their idle cash–a key selling point for Meow.
For example, Meow partners FirstBank and Grasshopper Bank both offer up to $125 million in FDIC-insurance through IntraFi’s sweep program which boasts a network of nearly 3,000 banks. Another Meow partner, Third Coast, offers FDIC-insurance up to $50 million through its own network. Arvanaghi says Meow is able to secure higher yields from the banks than a small business could get on its own, since it’s bringing in a large roster of sticky customers and its own interface.
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Legacy exchanges imposed steep transaction and conversion fees, undercutting Meow’s value proposition of offering low-cost financial services. These costs made it difficult for Meow to deliver USDC as a viable alternative to wire or ACH transfers for day-to-day business use.