Hey founder (and OP) here. This has been a labor of love for the past few years and I'm super stoked on what we shipped. Would love any and all feedback, thoughts and questions!
I'm excited about this because it may help with a problem I've had for many years: in a word, being my family's CFO.
I'm a data scientist, and I'd like to be able to report as easily on my own personal finances as I can on the data of the company I work for. This is not a small thing for me. I want to take care of my family's finances, but I'm impatient with bullshit. I don't want to spend an hour every weekend logging into 10 different services, clicking on 10 different things in each company's always-different, always-shitty web UI to pull all the data I need. The easier and more convenient this is to do, the better job I will do managing my money and protecting my family.
As a data scientist, I can handle writing a little code to make some API calls and crunch the numbers that come back. If APIs were available to me for all companies I have assets or liabilities with, I'd have no trouble being an awesome family CFO. But... there is nobody that wants to make this secure and easy for me!! I would have to go to a company like Personal Capital, give them ALL MY ACTUAL BANK LOGIN CREDENTIALS, and they'll go login and do some screen-scraping to get the data. Half the time that won't work because of 2FA complications. They'll bring that data into their little ecosystem, serve it through some shitty web interface, and use it to serve me whatever ad nonsense they want. It's immensely unpleasant, slow, unreliable, and insecure. It sucks ass.
Is your company going to fix this, or perhaps be one part of the solution? One day, will I be able to run my own R and Python scripts that pull all my data, balance my checkbook against receipt screenshots, automatic fraud detection, show me how all my investments are doing? Maybe even open-source it so that others can do the same?
Thank you so much, in advance, for reading and any reply you can make! I'm very excited for this!
You might be interested in Tiller Money https://www.tillerhq.com/. They provide something very much along these lines, with the output being an auto-updating Google Sheet that you can do whatever you like with. You do still need to update credentials sometimes, but I've been using it for a few years and it works quite well.
Hey there, you will be able to do all of this with our Klutch credit card. Full disclaimer I am the cofounder. But what we built is exactly what you are describing. Here is a link to our documentation- https://dev.klutchcard.com/docs
I would set all accounts to send monthly/weekly statements and get PDF's that way into an email. Then all that is needed is a python downloader + scraper + visualizer based on how much automation you need.
I'd avoid using any service to do this for you after what PLAID pulled off on people by storing their credentials and getting more info than what was actually needed.
This seems to be the US equivalent to Solarisbank, which operates only in some EU countries. I don't know any specifics, but I have encountered Solaris a few times. For example they are used by TradeRepublic, basically the German Robinhood equivalent, and a handful of Neobank providers. Those Neobanks usually focus onto a specific niche and build their product based on the services offered by Solaris.
I would imagine that Column could provide similar their services to similar companies and make the development of financial products significantly faster.
I imagine these limitations are going to be a moving target as they grow.
A lot of developer driven organizations are very happy to outsource complex parts of development to managed services so they can focus on their core differentiators, especially when it comes to parts of the stack that need super high availability and security. This is why Auth0/Okta are big businesses and not everyone rolls their own key cloak / shibboleth instances, as one of many examples.
This clearly seems like the Apex/Drivewealth model but for challenger banks or new online banking operations. It is hard to predict what startups or new projects will need this because those platforms can unlock innovation for new categories (e.g. no one imagined commission free trading in 2008, and Robinhood wouldn't exist without Apex).
I guess my point is that payment and ledger back-ends aren't the hardest part about running a bank, they aren't even the hardest technology component. This isn't "for developers" in the same sense that Stripe is. It is for people ready to run a bank. Sure it will save you paying lawyers and regulators for charters and it will save you from buying a mainframe to run some crufty COBOL ledger but that still leaves a lot of yak shaving before you even get to the interesting part of your Fintech product.
Okta is successful because almost every application needs authentication, almost every organization needs SSO, and no one considers it a core competency.
The intersection of organizations who can run a bank but don't already have entrenched software to do so, and want to build all the other software themselves seems vanishingly small.
> The intersection of organizations who can run a bank but don't already have entrenched software to do so, and want to build all the other software themselves seems vanishingly small.
Most FinTech is like this though. User Facing front end custom services built on top of bank infra. The bank infra is typically a bank partner and rarely is something like Stripe depending on the exact use case. This basically provides an intermediate alternative between Stripe and bespoke banking relationship.
Column's website says the company is "100% founder and employee owned."
I'm curious about that ownership structure. I'm assuming you're not organized as a worker cooperative, with a "one worker, one vote" structure? Would you be willing to offer any details about the ownership stake of the founders vs. the other employees and what sort of decision making employees' ownership stake entitles them to?
"Employee owned" almost always just means the company has an ESOP.[1]
It doesn't mean employees get any say in anything at all, it just means the employees are the company's shareholders. The board and upper management still has full say in all policies and operations.
Source: I worked almost exclusively at employee owned companies (though not intentionally). Working for an employee owned company is not meaningfully different than working for a public company or private company.
BTW, ESOPs have significant tax advantages for a founder [2]
This looks like an awesome shiny tool but I'm not sure what I could do with it!
Some Use Cases of successful or hypothetical customers using your product might help other understand how they can use Column for their business.
Is Column Use case to create cards/accounts for a business' customers like Apple did with the Apple credit card?
In my case, I'm the founder of https://www.waiterio.com which is a B2B order management system for restaurants... can I use Column to offer bank accounts and cards to restaurants owners? Or restaurant diners?
What are the winnings for me related to revenues/branding/customers retention?
Yes, you can use Column to create and offer bank accounts as well as build debit/credit/charge programs. There's a part of the website that describes some common use cases https://column.com/docs/guides/#use-cases
Here's an example of what one could do building off a platform like Column:
I previously worked at Center (https://getcenter.com), which after a few pivots, landed on offering expense management and analytics software to businesses. They partner with a vendor (not Column) to issue credit cards.
Center gets a realtime feed of card activity into their system to properly categorize the spend based on various signals or rules, which may, for example, prompt employee to attach a receipt. They focus on companies with decent T+E spend because they get the card interchange fees — that's the biz model: earn money from the card spend / merchant fees (as opposed to competitors such as Expensify that charge per user/card/report/etc).
And for the business using Center cards, they get nice software, instant visibility into spend, spending controls, et al, all at no cost to them. I don't mean to make this an ad for Center (I have zero financial stake in the company), just illustrating what you could do atop a platform like Column based on this specific example I worked closely on.
According to Column, their credit card service remits 100% of the interchange fee to the developer company, so you could build any number of services to enhance this data and service.
I wanted to make a community bank and then build the software to run it and start selling to other credit unions / community banks and start getting rid of the jack henry crap everywhere.
The product looks incredibly good. What I absolutely love the most is the fact the web site immediately addresses people with a human language at the left and plain code at the right. No marketingspeak. Love it.
However the title is a bit misleading. It says "a chartered bank for developers" while the correct title would be "a chartered bank for U.S. developers". I feel like in the IT community we see deeper diversity of nations and citizenships compared to the other industries, so much more people from the rest of the world.
To make sure I had to dug into the documentation. Indeed, US-specific properties are marked as required in the person creation API call[1]. So Column is a non-starter for anyone outside the `default_country`. It would be nice to mention this somewhere on the site perhaps to set proper expectations.
I don't see a link on your website to Column N.A.'s legal disclosures. I'm trying to determine whether you have your own direct connection to FedWire/FedACH, are going through a 3rd party service provider like Fiserv/FIS, or are going through another bank.
Oh, that’s good to hear. You should be in a good position to add support for FedNow having your own in-house connectivity solution. How are you feeling about being ready for that?
From what I gather this is the Tesla of banks (comparing new kid on the block to the old guard – Tesla vs GM): meaning it's a modern bank with systems that run on something newer than COBOL with an open API. It's extremely cool and looks like it may set the standard of what banks must be in the future to compete with newer generations coming into the market.
The most direct connection possible to the federal reserve with as little overhead as possible, accessible entirely over battle tested modern network API technology
We plan on rolling out some corresponding banking services this year to help people with multi-currency accounts and international wires - but it would still be under our US charter. No short term plans to go international - there's a lot of ground we need to cover here. We tend to like to go very deep in an area instead of getting to spread thin.
I can tell you MANY countries are NOT being served by services like STRIPE (South Africa for example) ! I always feel like there is a big opportunity bringing "these financial startups" to where the major players are NOT.
Congrats on releasing ! :)
I would use it, if it was available in South Africa :P
Yeah, it's a tough spot. For the big players, there's heavy investment to enter a new market due to local regulations. A local startup could probably do it more easily, but while they grow there's always the risk the big players might decide they're a threat, they want that market, and invest rapidly and dump the local startup.
Excited to kick the tires on this. Assuming it's correct to think of Column as a very special BaaS vendor (which owns its own bank and thus AVOIDS the double program manager problem), how would you compare and contrast your your unique value prop compared to other BaaS vendors like a Unit, Synapse, Treasury Prime?
Would it be fair to assume better economics because your supply chain is more vertically integrated, or is there more to it than that which I'm missing?
Eng @ Column here. Unlike the other BaaS providers, we ARE the bank. So the buck stops with us so to speak. You won't have to deal with middleware or a bunch of other partner banks, which we like to think is a much better experience.
That is certainly great from the experience side of things, but what I'm wondering about is the economics side of things -- that is, will I get more competitive revenue shares than with other BaaS vendors given that you are the bank?
I see you mention this in your docs, but do you provide any tools for the compliance side that would be required to use your API? E.g. if opening accounts on behalf of customers, all of those customers need to go through KYC. Do you monitor transactions for BSA/AML, or is that up to the user of the API?
This is giving me so many flashbacks to my time at jpmorgan. There’s a bunch of wonderfully interesting corner cases I’d really love to learn about how you address!
