Mercury has added a spend-management layer to its business banking product, and one of its features is a first: a company card for an AI agent.
Mercury Spend, announced August 12, 2026 and reported by FinTech Global, sits inside the existing Mercury account and is available now to its more than 300,000 customers. It issues physical and virtual cards to employees and, separately, to software agents that a business has authorized to make purchases.
How the agent cards work
An agent card is created by a human, limited to a set of parameters, and every transaction is logged, auditable and cancellable. Merchant and category restrictions apply at the point of sale, so a card issued for cloud infrastructure cannot buy plane tickets. Limits are enforced before the charge goes through rather than flagged afterward.
For employee cards, Mercury Spend adds receipt capture through Gmail or text message, and an automatic freeze on any card whose transactions are missing documentation. A natural-language layer lets an owner ask questions about spending in plain English.
“Founders need a scalable and programmatic way to manage spending,” said CEO Immad Akhund.
Why it matters for the business banking market
Mercury already leads our business bank account ranking on cost: no monthly fee, free domestic and international USD wires, and up to $5 million of FDIC coverage through partner-bank sweeps. Spend controls were the gap. Brex and Ramp built their businesses on corporate cards with policy enforcement, and Mercury’s customers who wanted that had to run a second platform. Mercury Spend closes that gap without a separate application.
The agent-card feature is ahead of demand for most small businesses, but it addresses a real problem for companies that let software buy things on their behalf: who is accountable, and how do you stop it. A card that can only spend on what it was issued for, with a human owner and an audit trail, is a reasonable answer.
What to check before you rely on it
Mercury is a fintech, not a bank, and its April 2026 conditional OCC approval to form Mercury Bank has not yet changed that. Deposits are held at Choice Financial Group and Column N.A. Spend controls live in Mercury’s software layer; the money still sits at the partner banks.
See how Mercury compares on fees, wires and tools in our best business bank accounts guide.