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.