What exactly is this? What does it allow me to do as a developer? Is this similar to the stuff Stripe offers?
I've been looking at the site and trying to figure it out, no luck.
Column – a chartered bank for developers
101–110 of 299 posts
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you ever heard how you could pay off your mortgage a lot quicker by making bi-weekly payments instead of monthly? Or how you can include extra with your payment and instruct your bank to apply it directly to the premium, helping you reduce your interest? Generally speaking you don't want to do that. A mortgage with an interest rate of like 3% (to which anyone in the last year refinanced or, or got on purchase…
You don’t want to do this now, but there’s a reasonable world we end up in where either inflation hovers at 1%, like most the last 5 years (so you earn 2% by paying down a mortgage, vs -1% when putting it into a savings account), or interest rates stabilize at 10%, or both! Also some people just hate having debt, and so they want to pay down debts as quickly as possible. Even if it’s “irrational” their goal is to pay…
Long term debt has a mental tax that does not show up in a bank statement. While it may be "smart" to pay the minimum amount on a subsidized student loan, there's nothing like just paying it off and being done with it, forever.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t want to do this now, but there’s a reasonable world we end up in where either inflation hovers at 1%, like most the last 5 years (so you earn 2% by paying down a mortgage, vs -1% when putting it into a savings account), or interest rates stabilize at 10%, or both! Also some people just hate having debt, and so they want to pay down debts as quickly as possible. Even if it’s “irrational” their goal is to pay…
Answering both you and GP I belong to the “some people” group you described in your post. It’s not that I don’t understand the math, it’s just that I don’t have the mental capacity and time in my life to take advantage of this arbitrage. To illustrate - I have an acquaintance who transfers money between credit cards to take advantage of points, and sign-up offers etc. Were I to engage in such activity myself - assumi…
There's no other thing to do, however, other than what you're already doing with your otherwise unused savings (hopefully index funds). Put your money in that instead of paying the mortgage early, and you'll end up with more money at the end of the mortgage. It's about the simplest optimization possible.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#104Im consistently disappointed with the state of banks in the US (Aussie here). This looks amazing. Would it be possible for me to build something for personal use on top of this? Or are you only targeting business at this stage?
Tacking onto this question, does anyone have recommendations for US banks that have API access and allow personal use? I've come across a couple companies such as Mercury but they're only for business use.
I know Chase at least offers an OFX endpoint if you pay a monthly fee (like ~$10/mo). I wrote a tool a while back that would automatically use that to download my transaction data and store it in a local format for personal accounting purposes. It worked well, but I abandoned it out of laziness.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#105I am one of the Engineers at Unit.co - we are also building a platform that allows developers to embed financial features into their product
Congratulations on the launch! the market is huge and competition is welcome :)
Column took a very interesting route, while we have Bank Partners that we develop with them, Column is also the bank , curies to know why they decided to take this route.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#106This looks so damn interesting and cool, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of a "bank for developers". I get payment processors, like Stripe, but this is a level or two below that, right?
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t want to do this now, but there’s a reasonable world we end up in where either inflation hovers at 1%, like most the last 5 years (so you earn 2% by paying down a mortgage, vs -1% when putting it into a savings account), or interest rates stabilize at 10%, or both! Also some people just hate having debt, and so they want to pay down debts as quickly as possible. Even if it’s “irrational” their goal is to pay…
Answering both you and GP I belong to the “some people” group you described in your post. It’s not that I don’t understand the math, it’s just that I don’t have the mental capacity and time in my life to take advantage of this arbitrage. To illustrate - I have an acquaintance who transfers money between credit cards to take advantage of points, and sign-up offers etc. Were I to engage in such activity myself - assumi…
The only optimization is don't pay off your mortgage early. It's actually less complicated haha.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's a non-chartered bank?
I believe they're looking to imply here that they own their own charter, rather than renting someone else's, which is how almost all U.S. fintech companies operate (look in the website footer of, say, Unit and you'll see: "Banking services are provided by Unit's partner banks who are Member FDIC.")
I assume that means Column can offer lower costs, or something?
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#109Hey, I’m an ex-Square that is part of founding engineering team at Column. My team will be monitoring this thread and we’ll be happy to answer any questions! Especially those about ACH, I’m sure you have plenty and we know it through-out!
how's the team liking using go so far? any pain points?
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#110What exactly is this? What does it allow me to do as a developer? Is this similar to the stuff Stripe offers? I've been looking at the site and trying to figure it out, no luck.
its for developers looking to build financial products that need bank accounts, payments, card issuing, lending, etc. Imagine you wanted to build Venmo; this would be pretty easy with Column APIs. Create bank accounts, deposit/withdraw, and send money between accounts programatically. That's probably the simplest example I can think of.