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 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!
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.
Do I have this right?
- Competent to develop and manage AML, KYC programs
- Wants to handle underwriting, fraud, compliance & operational risk exposure
- Develops software
- Doesn't want to talk to ACH & VISA
- Operates only in the US
Who is that?
I would imagine that Column could provide similar their services to similar companies and make the development of financial products significantly faster.
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).
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.
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.
At this level of integration minutiae I don't see a the benefit in not integrating directly with card issuers and ACH.
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?
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]
[1] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/employee-stock-ownershi...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/07/if-you-di...
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?
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.
Big congrats to you!
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.
>Would love any and all feedback, thoughts and questions!
How about custodial accounts?
EDIT: add " coming into the market" to the end
What are your plans to offer these services in other countries?
Congrats on releasing ! :) I would use it, if it was available in South Africa :P
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?
also: The little column icon slide to the top right on login is cool .
Thanks very much!
Can you talk a bit more about how KYC works at Column.