Relay 2.0 is the Relay you know and love—but better—because it’s powered by improved banking technology and a new Partner Bank, Thread Bank.
Upgrading to Relay 2.0 is free and required for all customers that were initially onboarded to our original banking technology partner and Evolve Bank & Trust.
You’re busy running your business, so we’ve streamlined the upgrade process as much as possible (you can learn more about that here). In this article, we want to provide more context about why we’re replacing our underlying banking technology and moving to a new Partner Bank.
Why is Relay moving to a new banking technology and a new Partner Bank?
It’s our mission to evolve Relay into an indispensable all-in-one money platform, providing all the tools you need to simplify and deeply understand how every dollar moves in, out and through your small business.
Unfortunately, our original banking partners were not able to get us there fast enough. We want to grow our platform faster and at a scale that they were not able to support. We decided to seek out a new partnership that could help us speed up our mission and deliver new features more quickly.
Thread Bank, our new Partner Bank, is already helping us deliver more value to you. Once you have 2.0 checking accounts, you’ll be able to deposit cash at any AllPoint ATM and set monthly spend controls for debit cards (a common request from our customers because monthly limits are more aligned to how businesses plan and track against budgets).
In early 2023, customers on Relay 2.0 will be able to order checkbooks from third-party vendors, open up accounts with competitive interest rates and automate cash flow with percentage-based, maximum-balance rules. We’re also developing receipt management features so that you and your team can even more meticulously keep track of spending by uploading and attaching receipts to Relay transactions.
This is just of the beginning of all the new features we can expedite with your new partners—more to come in 2023!
In addition to new features, what are the other benefits of moving to a new banking technology and a new Partner Bank?
It’s not just big-ticket features; the move to Thread Bank also comes with smaller—but delightful—improvements:
- Your business name will appear in a payee’s transaction feed when you send them a payment (no more “Relay” or “Evolve”)
- Cut-off time for same-day ACH is 3 pm EST (3 extra hours, and only for Relay Pro subscribers)
- Check payments will only appear on the ledger and statements when they are cashed; check returns will now show as separate line items in the ledger and statements (previously we only updated the status of the original transaction and this was confusing to our customers)
- New, reissued debit cards will be branded with our new colors and logo; eventually, you’ll be able to choose the color of each card
Will Relay ask me to change account and routing numbers again in the future?
No. Moving to a new Partner Bank is disruptive and tedious for our customers. We only want to do this once. We’ve done our due diligence in finding a new Partner Bank, and we’re in it for the long haul with Thread Bank.
Even in the unlikely scenario where we need to replace our underlying banking technology partner, we would not move our customers to a new Partner Bank and in this case customers would not need new account or routing numbers.