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 dist

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.