Why our founder moved to an online bank, plus the pros and cons of the one she chose

I’m going to walk you through why I moved to an online bank and the pros and cons of the banking platform that I chose. 

I’m Lexi Grant and I run a media business called They Got Acquired. 

It’s a remote business, which allows me to live in a beautiful town in West Virginia. 

The downside though is it’s far outside of the city.

So a few months ago when I needed to open a new bank account, I wanted to go to my big bank, which is the bank where I’d banked for the last 30 years. 

And they required that I come into the bank in person to open that account. 

So I had to go all the way to the city to do that.

So I took a train into Washington, DC.

It’s about an hour long train ride. 

I arrived for my appointment and then I spent another four hours at that bank, just trying to open an account. 

I left there so frustrated knowing that I’d spent my entire day at the bank, rather than working on my business or spending time with my kids. 

And on the train ride home, it hit me.

I have been running online businesses for the last 15 years. 

I’m always trying out new tools to solve problems and make life easier. 

Why have I not moved to an online bank? 

That set me down a rabbit hole, researching all the options, and in the end, I chose a bank called Relay. 

So I’m going to take the next few minutes to tell you about Relay and show you what it’s been like for me to use their platform.

Relay’s pitch is that they make banking easy for online businesses. 

And so far I’ve found this to be true, which is why I’m sharing this all with you. 

Relay offers checking, savings, accounts payable, and get this, even the option of a Profit First setup.

It’s a financial technology company, a fintech, that partners with an FDIC insured bank.

This is how most of the online banking options work. 

It took me just a few minutes to open my account. 

I’ll show you the signup page here. 

And I did it right from home, from my home office. 

And now I can do everything I need far more quickly and easily. 

So I thought I’d show you three of the features that I really appreciate as someone who runs my own online business.

This is a test account that I set up to show you, so you can’t see my account balances, but it mimics my own account. 

So first I want to show you their Profit First setup.

It’s easy and free to set up multiple checking accounts, so you can follow the Profit First accounting system. 

You can see there’s a bunch here and you can even reorder these.

So you can put a certain account at the top or the bottom, if you’d like. 

And now here’s the key: you don’t have to keep a minimum in any of those accounts. 

So that alone is in stark contrast to my previous bank, which fined me if one of my account balances dropped below the minimum. 

Relay even has an option for auto transfers.

So I’m excited to use this. 

Makes it easier to follow the Profit First system. 

I was actually on a webinar recently with the author of Profit First and he said he uses Relay because they make it so easy to implement Profit First. 

Next, Relay is free to use except for wire fees. 

It has no monthly account or overdraft fees.

That includes up to 50 debit cards. 

And I’ll show you the debit card section here. 

So you can get them for anyone on your team. 

Relay also has an upgrade option. They call it Relay Pro and it starts at $30 a month.

So this gets you access to more features like one that caught my eye was automated bill pay. 

But we’re a small business and everything we need, you know, is in the free version.

I also want to show you the integrations which are under settings. 

And a few that I noticed here were QuickBooks Online, Xero and Gusto. 

This really made me feel seen because I find traditional banks usually haven’t even heard of the tools that I’m using for my online business. 

Now, of course, the coolest part of all of this, and the biggest deal for me personally, is that I never have to set foot again inside a slow old school bank.

Everything – setting up a new account, sending a wire transfer, these can all be done right from my home office. 

I also want to show you what was tough for me about this switch. 

So the toughest part for us about making this switch is that many of the freelancers that we use, we used to pay them via Zelle.

And Relay does not have an integration with Zelle yet. 

So we needed to find a new solution to that. 

And the solution we came up with was twofold. 

First, some of our freelancers moved to a payment platform called Wise, which is popular with international freelancers. 

And then others opted to use ACH. 

And this is where I got excited because I came into Relay and went to send via ACH and it was way easier than it is with my old bank.

It just took a couple of clicks. It went through.

It’s free if you want to send via ACH where it arrives with the recipient within one or two days. 

But if you want to send a same day payment, that requires upgrading to Relay Pro. 

And finally, it did take us some time to reroute [00:05:00] all the platforms we use, like Stripe and our credit card, to connect to Relay instead of our old bank.

And if I’m honest, this task alone was one of the big things that held me back from switching over to a new bank. 

It really was not that bad. 

I looked at our old bank to see where money was coming in from and where it was going out to. 

I made a checklist to follow and then I just worked through that checklist with our bookkeeper.

In the end, it was worth it because we now get to enjoy being on the platform. 

And when I told Relay I was coming on board, they offered to sponsor They Got Acquired so I could tell you about my experience. 

Which means I now have a partner that makes banking easy, reliable, and supports small businesses.

If you’ve been putting off this move like I was, use our link to try Relay.