Column – a chartered bank for developers

Congratulations on the launch! I wonder if this kind of business model, where it looks like there is basically &quot;one really rich guy self-funding&quot; for a couple of years, is going to be more common.<p>That is, just looking at the site, my guess is that building everything from the ground up (core banking stack, acquiring the chartered bank, then all the APIs and tech on top of that) must have taken many years and many, many millions of dollars. And kudos, because the first thing that struck out at me is the documentation looks <i>excellent</i>. Overall, it looks like something where the the team had all the luxury to &quot;do things right from the ground floor&quot;, instead of scrambling and making shortcuts before their runway ran out. I just think it would have been very hard to find a VC willing to be patient enough to wait that long with no revenue or customer feedback (&quot;where&#x27;s your MVP???&quot;)

&gt; Create account numbers that point to a single bank account and create specific permissions and limits for each one.<p>I <i>love</i> that; there are so many places that give a 6% discount for using ACH but I don&#x27;t want to give out my bank account details willy-nilly<p>---<p>If you have influence over it, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend having <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.column.com&#x2F;uptime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.column.com&#x2F;uptime</a> default to &quot;Sandbox&quot; since I doubt seriously that&#x27;s what anyone would care about when going to an uptime page, and can also mislead a reader in a hurry if the Sandbox environment is having woes but Production is fine<p>nit: I would guess you meant &quot;sweep&quot; not &quot;sweet&quot; on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;column.com&#x2F;bank-accounts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;column.com&#x2F;bank-accounts</a><p>&gt; We support FBO, sweet, clearing and custom account types — all FDIC insured.

Hey founder (and OP) here. This has been a labor of love for the past few years and I&#x27;m super stoked on what we shipped. Would love any and all feedback, thoughts and questions!

Im consistently disappointed with the state of banks in the US (Aussie here). This looks amazing.<p>Would it be possible for me to build something for personal use on top of this? Or are you only targeting business at this stage?

Hey, I’m an ex-Square that is part of founding engineering team at Column. My team will be monitoring this thread and we’ll be happy to answer any questions! Especially those about ACH, I’m sure you have plenty and we know it through-out!

There’s something about this that smells like “anyone can now operate a bank without a charter or being subjected to regulatory oversight” that’s maximally distressing and I think it’s incumbent upon the founders to clarify their intent.<p>A proliferation of loosely regulated banking entities was the basis for an economic disaster over a century ago in the US when fractional reserve logic had yet to be formalized. I’m sure that Column enforces reserve requirements, but this has the stench of something that could enable some analogous calamity in the financial (and therefore real) world.<p>It was no less esteemed a figure than Galbraith himself who noted that there’s really no such thing as innovation in finance - it’s just people finding ways to run the same kinds of scams over and over again.<p>What’s to stop someone from using this to create a ‘virtual’ depository institution, issue bad loans against deposits that it attracts with the promise of extraordinary interest, monetize the loans for personal enrichment, and then crash and burn when the aggregate default rate of the loan portfolio becomes unsustainable, sticking the FDIC (and therefore taxpayers) with the bill? And that’s just one of many possible fraud scenarios.<p>The answer is either “nothing” or that Column doesn’t really matter as a company because the theoretical customer base is vanishingly small and it doesn’t solve the truly important problems in banking.

If this is a US-only service, it should say so on the website somewhere.<p>I&#x27;ve also had this experience with e.g. Betterment and Wealthfront. The only way to find out they&#x27;re US-only is halfway through sign up process, not even anywhere in FAQ&#x27;s.

I am not a professional developer, but I have been developing little projects because I realized the importance, both personally and professionally, of keeping up with new technologies. I would be interested in setting up an account with Column, if only to grow familiar with its advantages. I have been working with Stripe to handle my business&#x27; e-commerce and in-person payments. I am curious to know if there is an advantage to using Column in conjunction with a service like Stripe. I know Stripe does things like card issuing. What are the reasons, either explicit or esoteric, for using Column&#x27;s features rather than a service like Stripe where those features overlap?

This looks interesting. Their “before” picture is a bit misleading though; it’s a worst-case. You can already get an account with Silicon Valley Bank as a startup and originate ACH directly over NACHA (source: I built this).<p>However, providing an API abstraction over ACH is cool. I would say it’s worth paying a bit more to Stripe to not have to deal with ACH directly, but then you add a payment hop between you and your payees (==delay) so having a bank that offers a nice API without adding a hop would be very useful.<p>Note that “FBO” (for benefit of) bank accounts are actually quite a valuable feature that is expensive to set up as a startup, and let you execute some exotic legal&#x2F;funds-flow structures. So pretty cool that you can get those.

Will you support FedNow instant payments when it GAs next year? Alias support for transfers and payments?<p>Also, my favorite part of your site is this part of your Careers page:<p>&gt; I don’t fit into any of these roles.<p>&gt; You get Column and you think you can drive value on day one. We’ll be honest the bar will be pretty high for us to hire outside of these roles - but fuck it, surprise us. Give us a compelling narrative and hustle....and we promise we’ll read the email!<p>Very cool product, excited to see it grow. Def the future of fintech.

Questions for the founding team, and others: What books or resources did you helpful in understanding the plumbing of the US banking system?

So this is what Will wanted to do when he left Plaid. Having the financial means to &quot;buy&quot; a bank certainly helped. Nice!<p>Getting a new bank charter since the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has been virtually impossible. The number of banks in the US in the past decade or so has come down from ~6K to ~4K. New licenses for banks (State or Federal ) since 2008 have been negligible. So, let&#x27;s buy a &quot;small&quot; bank. So far so good<p>Next part is core banking software as well as Money movement software. This is where is gets interesting.<p>Smaller banks use Fiserv&#x2F;FIS&#x2F;Jack Henry (and a long tail of other core banking providers) and larger ones have a mix of systems with legacy cores e.g. DXC, Misys and bunch of others. While it&#x27;s tempting to build an entire banking stack from ground up it may not pass regulatory and compliance muster for a while. Plus even some the legacy cores have now built a rich RESTful API. Would be interesting to know how much of the core was built in house over the past 3 years<p>Next part is Money Movement. This is where ACH, Push to Card, Fedwire and RTP come in<p>ACH isn&#x27;t that bad. Most banks use ACH &quot;aggregators&quot; which in turn connect to one of the two ACH Operators. Once a bank has a business relationship with the Fed it&#x27;s not tough to connect to these aggregators and simply sftp files to&#x2F;from them<p>Push to Card is available through VISA Direct and MC Send. Given their financial resources and fintech background it wouldn&#x27;t be difficult to get a connection going there<p>RTP would be an interesting one but a relatively easy one since the Clearing House is already used to working with multiple banks and have &quot;plug-ins&quot;<p>So, now it all boils down to the business procedures and KYC&#x2F;KYB on Fintechs that want to use Column&#x27;s services. This can be done very efficiently online<p>The T&amp;Cs are heavily skewed in favor of column. Some of them may be unenforceable. But those can be negotiated

A little off topic, but I find it amusing phone booths have been reinvented. Also funny they look like refrigerators:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;column.com&#x2F;company" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;column.com&#x2F;company</a><p>Cool that a husband wife team is doing this, I wonder what their relationship is like.

Congrats on launching!<p>I just want to vent about something bank-related, and hopefully bait someone to tell me how this solves it. Or something else solves it.<p>Have you ever heard how you could pay off your mortgage a lot quicker by making bi-weekly payments instead of monthly? Or how you can include extra with your payment and instruct your bank to apply it directly to the premium, helping you reduce your interest?<p>TLDR, I think people giving this advice haven’t tried applying it.<p>Well, I wanted to do that - but in practice I found it near impossible to accomplish. First - any form of electronic bill-pay is right out of the window, because any extra payments or amount - the bank will apply as pre-paying your next scheduled payment, which means you are pre-paying not just principal, but the interest as well. Why would anyone want to do that? The bank helpfully told me that “some people maybe are going on vacation and will be away when the bill is due”. Yeah…<p>You can try to submit a paper invoice with special instructions by postal mail. Then it may or may not work. I don’t know if it’s incompetence or outright customer-hostile behavior from the bank, but this method succeeded only some of the time. You have to follow up by phone to find out and even so making any corrections after the fact is difficult and requires multiple call transfers and waiting on hold.

Where is the integration with the crypto networks? My crypto is programmable and I would love to see my bank have an api as well.

This is awesome!<p>Could you talk more about the monthly minimums? Also can I create personal accounts with this or is it just business accounts?

If a developer writes a product that others use, I wonder what type of legal fine print we need to include?<p>For example, if I start my own micro-credit card using this service, I may have my own legal t&amp;a, but I wonder if I need to include Column&#x27;s as well?

I like this, definitely will keep an eye on your service.<p>You need a proof reader.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;column.com&#x2F;card-programs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;column.com&#x2F;card-programs&#x2F;</a><p>Own your economics<p><pre><code> * You get 100% of interchange, control your unit economics, and build a company for scale. </code></pre> - * Unliked managed programs, we are built for scale and flexibility.<p>+ * Unlike managed programs, we are built for scale and flexibility.<p>Developer-first card program<p>- * We are developers at our core. From settelement to clearing you control the process from our dashboard or API.<p>+ * We are developers at our core. From settlement to clearing you control the process from our dashboard or API.

Whoa this is awesome, congrats on launch. I was following along with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Increase.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Increase.com</a> which seems to be in the same realm (former Stripe folks)

Wow, this is such an impressive launch&#x2F;reveal in so many ways... landing pages, documentation, philosophy, sheer scope. Congrats to everyone on the team for the quality of execution!

This is a cool idea for sure...as a dev I&#x27;ll definitely take a look at the API docs.<p>That said, are you a tad worried about the future of &quot;fintech apps&quot;? It seems like a lot of the revenue growth in this space was heavily related to ZIRP and&#x2F;or super low rates in the preceding few years, which made these apps more attractive to consumers. So, is there an existential worry that the success of the apps that will build on top of your bank is too closely tied to potentially unrealistic Fed policy?

How does this compare with Stripe Treasury (banking as a service)? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;treasury" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;treasury</a>

This looks super interesting!<p>Is use case only to build products on top of your platform or could it be used for personal finances and, as a developer, add automations and such over the API?

Very interesting. How are you dealing with KYC regulations? Do you provide that, or is it the responsibility of developers calling your API to have already done KYC.

Will you bank businesses related to cannabis but that don&#x27;t touch cannabis?<p>Also, your &#x27;Verify&#x27; email still has a bunch of default template text in it.<p>&quot;&quot;This is preheader text. Some clients will show this text as a preview.&quot;&quot;<p>-- Root&#x2F;Entity &amp; Beneficial Owner form has some ambigious error messages; doesn&#x27;t show where what is wrong (eg: which of the three addresses was bad?) -- and the message disappears before it can be acted on.

Your website should state on the front page where it is available.<p>Sounds interesting but if I don&#x27;t know it is available in my country - I won&#x27;t bother reading it.

What does &quot;chartered&quot; mean?

This looks nice, I&#x27;ve been wanting to make a whitelist-enabled card for ages now. It would ask me if I want to trust the merchant before every charge, so anything unrecognized would just be rejected. I could also set limits by month&#x2F;day&#x2F;year per merchant and anything above that wouldn&#x27;t go through.<p>Maybe this is exactly what I need.

This looks incredible, congrats on the release. Does anyone know if something similar exists in Canada?

Very minor nuanced criticism. The company is marketing itself to be developer-first, API first infrastructure, but then the all testimonials I came across are from the CEOs and co-CEOs and not developers.<p>It would be quite powerful and impactful if you have developer testimonials too.

I have two separate lines of questioning:<p>1. Does this paint a bigger target on your back, exposing more via custom APIs than most?<p>2. What do you plan to ban via Terms of Service? Do you have the stomach for things other payment processors don&#x27;t? (adult, fringe groups, etc.)

Long ago I was part of a team (but not the first core team) that built a pension and investment system from scratch , because there were no banking APIs available from anyone, we convinced a bank to let’s us connect to them as an ATM

This looks so damn interesting and cool, but I&#x27;m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of a &quot;bank for developers&quot;. I get payment processors, like Stripe, but this is a level or two below that, right?

Could you share more on the legal entities that underlie Column? In particular, what’s actually chartered at OCC and a member of FDIC? I can’t find you, but maybe you just have a different name (for now?)

Congratulations! Really excited and happy to see this come to fruition.

Can someone re-create Simple with this? I loved that service.

I am one of the Engineers at Unit.co - we are also building a platform that allows developers to embed financial features into their product Congratulations on the launch! the market is huge and competition is welcome :) Column took a very interesting route, while we have Bank Partners that we develop with them, Column is also the bank , curies to know why they decided to take this route.

Silly question - is there any way to offer a card payment from Column, but restrict which outlets &#x2F; shops can accept the payment?<p>(I have an idea in mind :-)

I created an account just to check it out and the signup and initial setup flow is very well done. Nice work.

Clearly the team has a lot of experience in fintech but I was wondering what the major regulatory hoops someone would have to jump through to build something like this -- especially if someone wanted to make a similar product in Canada&#x2F;LatAm&#x2F;Europe&#x2F;etc. Any insights?

Are there any costs? Is it all free? And you make money on deposits like any ordinary bank?

I wonder how Column managed to launch when others couldn&#x27;t. Were the others too early?

This looks fantastic. Any plans to open international transfers? (swift). There is a real need for a good api driven cheap solution to move money across countries which is at the moment filled by 3rd parties that are not stable or scalable.

This will be big.

Can I, uh, make a bank account for _myself_ without being a corporate customer?

Great landing page but I&#x27;m just going to point out that the code sample is curling a WIRE of $40,000 and the top entry in the &quot;Transfers&quot; is a WIRE for $4,000 and its driving me nuts :)

Solid Financial Technologies pretty much does this and has a number of companies as customers. Here&#x27;s the API for enrolling Persons, Businesses, doing KYC&#x2F;KYB, creating bank accounts, issuing virtual&#x2F;physical credit cards, letting customers use credit cards, do ACH &#x2F; wire transfers, ... accounts in US$ or ETHER or DOGE or other crypto ... everything a startup or established company needs for providing financial experiences to their customers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.solidfi.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;introduction?&amp;_ga=2.45803424.508154571.1650609947-187713509.1650609947" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.solidfi.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;introduction?&amp;_ga=2.45803424.50...</a><p>EDIT: physical&#x2F;virtual credit cards

Does anyone know what they used to produce their API documentation?

What exactly is this? What does it allow me to do as a developer? Is this similar to the stuff Stripe offers?<p>I&#x27;ve been looking at the site and trying to figure it out, no luck.

I had pondered whether an API-first bank existed just the other day, searched, but was unimpressed with what I found.<p>I think you guys built the right thing.<p>Wish you all the best in the endeavor!

Looks amazing. Would love to have this in the UK.

Not sure if it&#x27;s just me, but the website is -really- slow in Firefox. Like, the refresh rate&#x2F;frame rate is terrible.

Nice job, are you available in europe? If not, do you know any competitor doing something similar&#x2F;when are you heading here?

Looks awesome. Plan to support RTP? FedNow?

Just so i&#x27;m clear on what this is - is this just a bank with a very developer centric and expansive API?

Brilliant. Wish you the best of luck!

This is really really cool. Opens up a whole world of possibilities, great work!

Congrats @whockey and team! Really powerful place to be in the next few years.

Any plans for fully fledged transaction banking and treasury services?

What are some of things you can build using Column? Ideas?<p>Btw, amazing brand name. Column.

Good luck filling out all the SARs. I shudder to think of the volume

Very cool! Is this powered by Marqeta under the hood?

Do you plan on offering merchant accounts? (mids)?

How long will it take to be acquired by Stripe?

Will this service allow me to replace Stripe?

Cool! Now do it again, but for Europe.

This is the XRP ledger without XRP

Well this is fucking awesome.

This looks really cool, but can someone help me understand more about where it fits in the market?<p>Is this for me, as a developer to just make my own bank accounts? Does this allow me to create a bank frontend SaaS and use column as the backend? Can I originate loans with this platform for myself, or maybe to others somehow?<p>tl;dr Who is the customer?

Word for this is based.

This but as a credit union