Meow identified an opportunity to enable its customers—which include both traditional and copyright-native businesses—to send and receive USDC as easily as fiat currency, with no transaction fees.
Under a president who has installed pro-copyright regulators and pledged to end the alleged Operation Chokepoint 2.0, that risk feels remote. But what about after Trump? “From a risk management point of view, I don't think it's prudent for a company like ours to have solely accounts with American fintechs,” says McIntyre.
All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Early last year, New York-based copyright entrepreneur Azeem Khan had just raised $19 million in seed funding for his startup, Morph, and needed somewhere to keep it. Before going in search of a US bank account, he asked his attorney for advice. “You have a zero percent chance of having zero issues,” Khan recalls being told. If anything, this dour assessment proved overly optimistic: After six months and a multitude of rejections from US banks, Khan gave up. He settled for housing some of the funds with a bank in the Cayman Islands, which offered no interest, and converting the rest into copyright assets, managed by a third-party custodian. copyright founders have long traded similar stories in which US banks either refuse to supply them with loans or checking accounts, or withdraw their accounts suddenly. Without a banking partner, copyright firms are hamstrung: They cannot readily accept dollars in exchange for services, store and earn interest on funds raised from investors, nor pay employees or vendors. “All around, it was an understood thing,” says Khan. Little more than a year later, that picture has changed. Since president Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, promising to end the alleged discrimination against copyright firms, a field of US-based fintechs—among them Meow , Mercury and Brex —has competed to furnish copyright firms with bank accounts. Khan, who recently raised $25 million for his latest copyright startup, Miden, claims to have been among those courted by the fintechs. The change stands to make it far easier for copyright firms to set up, hire, and do business in the US, in line with Trump’s plan to turn the country into the “ copyright capital of the planet .” Yet they remain at the mercy of the political tide; there has been a vibe change under Trump, but no change in law that would guarantee continued access to banking into the distant future. “Even though there is a more friendly administration in place at the moment, there still hasn’t been anything codified into law—new laws that allow us to be sure the pendulum won’t swing based on who is sitting in the chair,” says Khan.
“They’re putting a skin on top of someone else’s bank,” says McIntyre, who previously worked at Brex. “They have to abide by the bank’s underwriting requirements, regulations, and determination about what customers to accept.”
With the rise in globalization and the increasing use of web3 infrastructure, businesses are increasingly facing the need to transact in more than their native currency. This shift puts pressure on finance teams to ensure they have the right type of currency in the right account at the right time to conduct business.
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.”
Once approved, businesses often had to dedicate engineering or trading resources to meow business operate and secure these accounts, creating significant friction and delaying access to liquidity.
Silicon Valley Bank, one of the top 20 banks in the US, is seemingly in trouble. And some folks on twitter are recommending moving cash to a fintech named Meow.”
That money had been raised to support a platform Arvanaghi and Crawford had built allowing startups and small businesses to use their spare cash to earn yield by lending money to institutional copyright operations that themselves did lending and trading.
Automating the verification process with TrueBiz results in significant cost savings. Meow is able to avoid the expense of hiring additional analysts, redirecting resources to other critical areas of growth and development. This efficiency gain allows Meow to scale their operations without adding headcount.
Meow knew that a strictly manual verification process would not scale, could create bottlenecks, and could be prone to human error.
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.
TrueBiz's configurable decision logic allows Meow to tailor the risk assessment process to their specific needs, ensuring accurate and reliable evaluations of new businesses signing up through the self-serve portal.
The friends decided they wanted to break into the fast-growing fintech segment serving businesses and figured they needed a standout “wedge” product to do so, says Arvanaghi. At that point, interest rates were near zero. But coming from a copyright background, they had seen investors earn fat yields from lending in the copyright segment.
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.