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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, though
by whockey 4y ago
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!
- leetrout 4y agoI have had this dream for YEARS. 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!
- egorfine 4y agoFintech dev here. 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. [1] https://column.com/docs/api/#entity/create-person https://column.com/docs/api/#entity/create-person
- ur-whale 4y agoThis looks like it's US only right now, is that correct? What are your plans to offer these services in other countries?
- whockey 4y agoWe 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.
- rawoke083600 4y agoI 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
- thecosas 4y agoLooks like Paystack is available in South Africa and might be worth checking out if you haven't already :-) https://paystack.com/za/pricing?localeUpdate=true https://paystack.com/za/pricing?localeUpdate=true
- sofixa 4y agoYeah, 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.
- s_dev 4y agoHow would you describe your business to a five year old?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ushakov 4y ago
- droobles 4y agoFrom 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. EDIT: add " coming into the market" to the end
- orangepurple 4y agoThe most direct connection possible to the federal reserve with as little overhead as possible, accessible entirely over battle tested modern network API technology
- edmcnulty101 4y agoNo questions. Just wanted to say I got chills when I looked at this at how much potential it had. Very cool. also: The little column icon slide to the top right on login is cool .
- anonymouse008 4y agoSeriously, I'm so happy someone has done this. I would love it if the new saying was 'Column solves this'
- thedangler 4y agoThis is amazing. Good work!
- kolanos 4y agoAs someone who knows what goes into something like this, this is truly impressive work. Congrats on the launch.
- ramesh31 4y agoGreat stuff. Dealing with the insanity of legacy workarounds a la Plaid has been a consistent nightmare for my company. >Would love any and all feedback, thoughts and questions! How about custodial accounts?
- kolanos 4y agoIs there a way to invite other users to a developer account? Or is it single user?
- whockey 4y agoYou can invite others to your team!
- giorgioz 4y agoThis 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 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?
- fierro 4y agoYes, 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 https://column.com/docs/guides/#use-cases
- mijkal 4y agoHere's an example of what one could do building off a platform like Column: I previously worked at Center (https://getcenter.com 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoI 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? Thanks very much!
- politician 4y agoTheir docs lay out the list of regs: https://column.com/docs/guides/bank-accounts#compliance--legal-requirements https://column.com/docs/guides/bank-accounts#compliance--leg...
- jawns 4y agoColumn'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?
- astura 4y ago"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] [1] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/employee-stock-ownership-plans-esops https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/employee-stock-ownershi... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/07/if-you-dislike-paying-taxes-youre-going-to-love-esops https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/07/if-you-di...
- politician 4y agoI 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.
- fierro 4y agoWe connect directly to the Federal Reserve. No middleware (i.e Fiserv/FIS), no other banks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- politician 4y agoOh, 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?
- alberth 4y agoLooks fantastic and the onboarding is great. Can you talk a bit more about how KYC works at Column.
- jeremyjh 4y agoI'm a little confused about who your customers are. 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?
- mushufasa 4y agoI 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).
- jeremyjh 4y agoI 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.
- TheColorYellow 4y ago> 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.
- civilized 4y agoI'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!
- GregorStocks 4y agoYou might be interested in Tiller Money https://www.tillerhq.com/ 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.
- civilized 4y agoI've never heard of this! I've seen millions of ads over the last few years, why haven't any of them been for this! I will check it out, thank you!
- frays 4y agoWould you consider Column a Neobank [0] or would this sit in a different category? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neobank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neobank
- boredumb 4y agoDoes this work in Puerto Rico?
- yowlingcat 4y agoExcited 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?
- _praf 4y agoEng @ 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.
- yowlingcat 4y agoThat 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?
- molsongolden 4y agohttps://increase.com/ https://increase.com/ might be more similar to Column than the software/API-layer vendors above.
- carterschonwald 4y agoThis 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!
- hestefisk 4y agoWhat core banking engine do you use?
- solaxun 4y agoThe one they built, apparently.