Mercury launches Spend with employee & agent cards

Mercury has launched Mercury Spend, adding employee and agent cards to its banking platform.

The service brings budgeting controls, expense policy enforcement and accounting workflows into Mercury's existing dashboard for business customers.

Mercury is expanding its product range as more start-ups and growing businesses look to manage spending with smaller finance teams and a broader mix of staff, contractors and software agents. The new tools are designed to let founders issue cards, set limits and monitor spending from the same place they manage cash.

A central part of the launch is a budget system that lets companies create spending pools for areas such as travel, software or procurement. Cards can then be issued to employees against those budgets, with spending limits applied automatically. Transactions that exceed a budget can be declined at the point of sale, while merchants can be restricted by name or merchant category code.

Mercury is also introducing what it calls agent cards, aimed at businesses that want AI systems to make purchases within preset rules. These cards must be created by a human user and remain trackable, auditable and cancellable. The agent can spend only within its assigned limits and cannot change those controls.

The launch reflects a broader shift in financial software toward handling operational activity carried out by AI tools as well as employees. That creates a new control challenge for companies that want automation to execute tasks while keeping spending within approved policies.

Spend automatically routes transactions to the correct budget and gives administrators options to define how spending data moves into accounting systems. The product also includes receipt collection through a Gmail connection that scans a linked inbox and matches receipts to transactions, as well as a text-based option that lets employees send receipt photos.

Another feature automatically freezes cards when required information, such as a receipt, memo or category, is missing. The freeze remains in place until the employee provides the missing item, creating a built-in compliance mechanism rather than leaving enforcement to manual review.

Agent spending

Mercury has linked the new spend management functions to its AI layer, known as Command. Customers can access Spend functions through natural-language prompts, including managing spending, checking cash positions, setting automatic rules and sending invoices, subject to user approval.

The addition is significant for Mercury because it puts spend management more directly at the centre of its banking product rather than treating it as a separate finance tool. For customers, that means spending activity sits alongside cash balances and runway data in a single system.

That integrated approach is one of Mercury's main arguments against traditional spend management products, which often require separate implementation, integrations and ongoing administration. Mercury is positioning Spend as a system founders can set up quickly without relying on a dedicated finance team.

Mercury did not announce separate pricing details in the material released alongside the launch, but said Mercury Spend is now available to its business banking customers. The company says it serves more than 300,000 entrepreneurs.

The launch also includes a limited-edition IO card created in collaboration with sculptor, ceramicist and designer Simone Bodmer-Turner. Mercury said the card design is based on an original sculpture and uses layered printing to create a tactile finish.

Immad Akhund, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Mercury, framed the launch in the context of changing company structures and workloads.

"Companies can be smaller and faster than they were two years ago, and they're a mix of people and agents doing real work," said Immad Akhund, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Mercury.

"Founders need a scalable and programmatic way to manage spending, understand where money is going, and automate the busywork of receipts and accounting. With Mercury Spend, founders can give their teams and agents a real spending infrastructure, not just a card."