Mercury MCP server adds payment requests with human approval
Mercury's MCP server now lets ChatGPT, Claude and other MCP clients request payments and transfers and edit expense categories or notes, while final approval stays in Mercury and requests expire in about five minutes.
Your AI agent can now pay your vendors. It just can't press the final button. Mercury upgraded its MCP server (the connector that lets AI tools talk to your bank account) from read-only to actions. From ChatGPT, Claude, or any MCP client you can now: • Request a payment to an existing recipient • Request a transfer between your own Mercury accounts • Create or edit custom expense categories • Update a transaction's note or category The design choices are the interesting part: 1. Money never moves from chat. The agent creates a request, and you approve it inside Mercury on web or mobile. Confirming in the chat is not approval. 2. Approval requests expire after about 5 minutes. 3. Agents can't add new recipients. To pay someone new, you add them in Mercury first. 4. Every write action has its own OAuth scope, like transactions:request or transfers:request. Existing read-only connections have to reconnect to get them. 5. Your organization's approval policies still apply. Only category and note edits skip approval and apply immediately. My takeaway as a builder: this is the template for agentic fintech. Let the agent do the prep work, keep the irreversible step behind a human, and scope permissions per action instead of all-or-nothing. If you're shipping AI features in a finance app, "AI drafts, humans approve" is the safest way to start. Would you let an AI agent queue payments from your business account? #fintech #AI