That would explain the heavy corp speak and complete lack of transparency. I don't expect them to budge or concede on any of this since the playbook is double-down, deny, and let it blow over. Blah.
I'm moving my funds out of Brex and will never bank with them. If you're in the same boat transferring founds out, be sure to leave a penny in your account and take a look at:
- https://www.mercury.com for small business banking. This is who I bank with now for small accounts and it works great. My only complaint is they don't yet have a credit card product, which makes purchasing online slightly riskier since debit disputes are harder than credit.
- https://www.airbase.com if you're looking for Brex Empower that doesn't have a track record of pulling the rug out from under people and need to control spend, etc. I've had experience running millions of dollars through Airbase and its great. No complaints. They're also great at responding to the needs of users.
The idea that this doesn't require face to face handling simply chills me to the bone. Is this how we're preparing for the worst economy in fifty years?
edit: PR used to begin with word of mouth. Just because we're online doesn't mean you can sh*post excuses and be done.
In a bygone era I'd have suggested that shame came into it.
It's because you can't convince anyone you're competent whilst acting up like this.
In 2018, we launched Brex and started serving the fastest growing companies out there (DoorDash, Airtable, ScaleAI, Flexport, etc). As we expanded in 2020, we decided to start serving small businesses. We onboarded tens of thousands of traditional brick-and-mortar companies to Brex, along with startups. Over time, we realized that our startup customers were growing very fast, and needed BrexHQ to scale with them, but Brex didn’t work as well for larger companies.
Last year, we decided to go back to our core, and shift our resources to make sure startups could scale with Brex. However, we still had tens of thousands of small businesses with very different needs from fast-growing companies. By spreading ourselves too thin, we couldn’t serve either small businesses or startups well:
1) Small businesses didn’t get the products they needed (e.g. working capital solutions). 2) We had to degrade the white-glove level of service we offered to startups, in order to scale to tens of thousands of customers.
As we continued to scale Brex to serve startups (such as 70% of YC companies!), we realized we couldn’t do a great job serving small businesses at the same time. This led us to the painful decision to stop serving traditional small businesses. We decided to draw the line of who’s eligible as any customer who received any investment (accelerator, angel, VC, web3 token, etc).
This has been an incredibly difficult decision for the team, but it allows us to deeply focus on serving startups better. I wish we had been more transparent with the startup community about what this means to them – apologies for all the confusion.
If you believe we made a mistake offboarding you, please let us know at [email protected]
I know you won't do anything about this, but you should seriously reconsider your Chief Communications Officer if you're serious about targeting startups (reasons at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31780900). Assuming they're advising the customer communication for this strategy shift, you're getting terrible advice as evident by the poor response here and in the press. This was a huge opportunity to reframe Brex as being all about funded startups. Instead Brex is coming across as arrogant with no concern for customers unless they have boatloads of money and fit into the strategy. It's very unbecoming to startups and sounds like how Oracle would communicate to the world.
Now, I'm not so sure. And I'll definitely have to caveat it with this event. Was that worth it?
Word of mouth is highly influential for how startup founders pick products and I feel like this will be super damaging for your brand.
Whoever approved this communication squandered a chance to reframe what Brex is now about. Had the announcement said something like, “what’s the new criteria? $1m deposits … blah blah blah … we actually lose money on smaller customers … yadda yadda … it’s not sustainable”, you could have established yourself as transparent with a tough choice that you had to make. People can understand that.
Instead you post platitudes like “We’ve made the difficult decision” with nothing substantive and are establishing Brex as cagey, opaque, and unnecessarily defensive. Not a good look for your banks existing customers.
Now you’ve got a PR mess on your hands to clean up. Please consider a transparent postmortem on this blunder instead of doubling down on more corp PR speak.