Mercury Is Moving You from Choice Financial Group to Column N.A. — Here’s the Whole Thing, Step by Step

It begins with an email from Mercury to the address on your account. It is easy to mistake for marketing and ignore — don’t. This is a required notice. It explains that your company currently banks with Choice Financial Group and that your account needs to move to Column N.A. by a stated deadline, and it lists two perks Mercury says you’ll gain: lower FX rates on incoming wires and real-time payments.

What the email actually asks of you:

1. Confirm your business info before the deadline.
2. Mercury reviews it and tells you the next steps to open the Column account.
3. You use the built-in migration tool to replicate accounts and move balances. Both account sets stay open during the transition.

Click the purple Get started button, or just go to mercury.com and log in.

Head to mercury.com and sign in. Nothing unusual here — email and password, with a passkey option (Face ID / fingerprint / security key) if you’ve set one up.

The moment you land on the dashboard, an Action requiredmodal appears over everything: “Your Mercury partner bank is changing.” You can’t make it disappear without ticking the acknowledgment box — Mercury wants to be certain you’ve seen it.

Read it, check the box (“I understand that if I don’t update to Column N.A. by the deadline, my Mercury account will be closed”), and click Get started. You can click Close to come back later, but the clock is running.

This is the most document-heavy screen. You’ll review four legal agreements for Column, each expandable with a dropdown arrow, each marked with a green check once you’ve opened it.

• Summary of the switch process — what changes and what doesn’t
• Commercial Deposit & Savings Account Agreement — your core accounts
• Sweep Program & Custodial Agreements — how excess balances can be spread across institutions to extend FDIC coverage, subject to the program’s terms
• Commercial Debit Card Agreement — your Mercury card under Column

A useful detail for the nervous: the agreements confirm your servicer is still Mercury Technologies Inc., and that deposit insurance continues through Column’s FDIC-insured program, subject to its terms. Open all four, then click Agree and continue.

Mercury now asks you to confirm your company information before it opens the new account. This is the KYC gate. Click Start review when you have your documents ready.

You’ll see Update company info broken into three sections, all due by the deadline. You can do them in any order. There’s a Snooze for 7 days button, but don’t lean on it — Mercury still needs time to review after you submit.

• 👥 Ownership and control details — you, your passport, ownership %, residency
• 🏢 Business details — legal name, EIN, state, addresses
• 🔄 Company activity — what you do, volumes, funding sources

Start with Ownership and control details — it’s the most important one for foreign owners.

Mercury shows your existing owner profile and asks you to confirm it. Most fields are self-explanatory, but two deserve your full attention.

Scroll down on the same profile to your residential address, your uploaded ID, and the controlling-person confirmation.

For a single-member LLC you can skip “Add a new owner or controlling person,” then select yourself as the person with primary control. The fine print is a real legal certification — by clicking Confirm you certify the information is accurate, so double-check name spelling (must match your passport), 100% ownership, and Non-Resident status before you submit.

Now Mercury wants a document proving your residential address. It runs an automated check that compares the name and address on your document against your profile. When you live abroad, this is where things get interesting.

See the why behind this in the next section — it’s the single most useful thing in this guide, so it gets its own write-up below. The short version: if the auto-check passes, great; if it flags a mismatch, you can usually proceed anyway into a short human review.

A clean pass looks like this:

Once verification clears (instantly or after the short review), you’re back on the ownership summary with a green check on your profile. Confirm you’re set as the primary controlling person and click Confirm.

Back on the overview, open Business details. Mercury shows your existing company record — legal name, DBA, EIN, company type, description, formation document and date, industry — and asks if it’s still accurate.

Next Mercury asks for your company’s legal address. This is not your home address abroad — it’s the US address on your Articles of Organization, which for most foreign owners is their registered agent’s address.

Then Mercury asks for your company’s physical address— “the office or residential address where you do most of your work.” This is a different question, and for foreign owners the honest answer is usually a foreign address: your home office, co-working space, wherever you actually sit.

You’ll upload a document to verify it. The same non-English rules from Step 9 apply — try an English document first; if you don’t have one, submit anyway and let it go to human review.

The Company activity section asks for your website, the countries you operate in and move money to/from, your average balance, your monthly volume, why you need a US bank, and how the account is funded (Revenue / Self / Investors). If you choose Revenue, you’ll upload a payout summary or invoice.

Depending on your industry, Mercury asks a couple more questions — customer type (B2B / B2C), how you sell (direct / indirect), and where you sell. Answer truthfully and consistently with everything else.

Finish all three sections and you’ll hit the thank-you screen. Mercury reviews your information over the next few days and emails you when it’s done — or if it needs more. Click Go to Dashboard; you’ve done your part.