The company provides USD loans backed by copyright, interest-earning accounts for digital assets, and a platform for trading various cryptocurrencies. It was founded in 2017 and is based in Jersey City, New Jersey.
USDC operations were isolated from core treasury and accounting systems. Transactions had to be manually reconciled with fiat accounts, forcing finance teams to map each USDC payment back to a dollar transaction within ERP tools like copyright. This created inefficiencies and operational overhead for companies that Meow sought to solve.
They knew they couldn’t succeed over the long term with just one product–busy business owners demand convenience. So this past January, five months after opening their T-bill platform, Meow introduced FDIC-insured business checking accounts promising a 4.8% annual yield. Like most fintechs, Meow lacks a banking charter and so it partners with banks, which in turn network with other banks.
For business checking accounts at the same underlying bank, you can perform instant internal transfers:
When he decided to start his own company, he called up his buddy Crawford, who by then held a well paid gig as a senior software engineer at Facebook (now Meta) in New York. Crawford gamely quit his job and moved to Miami.
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.”
Meow collaborated with Bridge to build a solution that enables businesses to send and receive USDC seamlessly from the same platform where they manage all their financial operations.
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.”
Treasure specializes in corporate treasury management within the financial services sector, offering a cash management platform for managing surplus business funds. The company provides investment solutions managed by an experienced investment team, focusing on security and compliance.
But the arrangement also typically requires the fintech to follow ground rules set by the partner bank, including parameters around the types of client they are allowed to serve. Mercury, for instance, is unable to provide accounts to copyright companies that take custody of customer funds, including exchanges, a spokesperson told WIRED.
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.
In the past, says Timm, expansion into new lines of business—say, copyright—has been a source of friction between fintechs, for whom explosive growth is the priority , and their partner banks, who bear ultimate accountability for upholding the conditions of their licenses, including strict AML controls.
Meow is building tools to address this problem, especially for those companies that need help managing their copyright assets and payments.
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