Mercury received a conditional nod for deposit insurance Tuesday, more than 260 days after submitting its application to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Mercury Bank N.A., headquartered in Salt Lake City, must provide initial paid-in capital of $300 million to open, and submit background information for each of its proposed senior executive officers not previously submitted with its application.

The proposed bank must also obtain prior written approval for proposed changes to management, ownership or control; and will need to submit a complete shareholder list for its parent company.

“I started Mercury in 2017 because I wanted to build the bank I wished had existed when I was running my previous companies,” Immad Akhund, Mercury founder, said in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. “Going from a fintech that partners with banks to a tech company with an actual bank has been the vision from the beginning.”

Mercury Bank is projected to open next year. But “there’s still work between here and opening Mercury Bank’s virtual doors,” he wrote. While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave it conditional charter approval in April, the Federal Reserve still needs to approve the firm’s bank holding company application.

Mercury announced it had applied for a charter in December, at the time appointing Jon Auxier — an alum of SoFi, Green Dot and Goldman Sachs — as CEO of the proposed Mercury Bank.

“The work now is earning trust by building the bank our customers deserve,” Auxier said when Mercury received its conditional charter. “That means the operational infrastructure and risk management discipline to match the standard Mercury’s product has already set.”

Auxier helped lead the implementation of SoFi’s national bank charter, which it filed for in 2020 and conditionally received in 2022. SoFi was one of 15 de novos to apply for a charter in 2020, an unusual year compared to its calendar neighbors: The OCC had received 15 de novo applications in total over the previous nine years, and no more than a half-dozen in each of the three years that followed it.

Last year, however, the OCC received 18 de novo applications. By August of this year, it received 22 more.

Generally, “new bank formation in this country is a sign of the health of the banking system,” Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said in a February interview. “And it is something that, where possible and consistent with the statutory factors, we should encourage, because it is a way to ensure that the banking system remains responsive to the communities and the economies across America that it is designed to serve.”

FDIC Chair Travis Hill has spoken in favor of de novo formation, as well. New bank formation had “fallen off a cliff,” he said last year.

Mercury Bank is the second bank in two weeks to get the FDIC’s nod. VALT Bank, a proposed Eagle, Idaho-based digital business bank, received conditional approval Aug. 25. VALT plans to open in the fourth quarter.