Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Column – a chartered bank for developers

column.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 299 posts

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#121

Post by phphphphp »

bogwog wrote: post #108
lachyg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m sure costs is part of the equation but I’d imagine the control is far more important. Reselling legacy bank services means you’re limited to what they can do, which is usually not much. Most finance technology is heavily limited by what they can do… because of their partners, and that’s why they’re usually just nicer interfaces to the same old services. Hence banks like Monzo in the UK building their own infrastructure from the ground up too. The less you’re dependent on legacy technology, the more you can do.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#123

Post by tclancy »

VincentEvans wrote: post #43

Congrats on launching! I just want to vent about something bank-related, and hopefully bait someone to tell me how this solves it. Or something else solves it. 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?…

This got a lot harder with the rise of the Internet because what was fairly well-known became completely well-known so loaners started creating poison pill clauses to try to stop it. And then once they moved to electronic billing a lot of them came up with the hostile options you mention. The couple of times I have refinanced mortgages, I explicitly checked this when choosing between offers.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#124

Post by Brystephor »

strzalek wrote: post #2

Hey, 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!

1. Can you share some use cases for this?

2. It seems like I can use your API to create bank accounts with your bank. Does this mean I could become a "bank wrapper" and use your API to generate real bank accounts and become a digital bank without having to go through the legal processes of becoming a real bank?

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#125

Post by crate_barre »

tristanMatthias wrote: post #29

Im 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?

Just to add to your point, can one run their own bank with this?

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#127

Post by nickprins »

whockey wrote: post #31
mdaniel wrote: post #18

> Create account numbers that point to a single bank account and create specific permissions and limits for each one. I love that; there are so many places that give a 6% discount for using ACH but I don't want to give out my bank account details willy-nilly --- If you have influence over it, I wouldn't recommend having https://status.column.com/uptime default to "Sandbox" since I doubt seriously that's what anyone w…

I'm glad you noticed the account numbers as pointers concept - we think its pretty cool. I think there's some rad use cases that people will come up with! Thanks on the typo...deploying now :0

One that I recently found out about is reconciliation from https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/a-game-that-intentionally-...

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#128

Post by _praf »

bogwog wrote: post #106

This 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?

Engineer at Column here! Exactly - we provide access to bare metal banking. Think of us as the bottom layer of the financial infrastructure stack.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#130

Post by not_math »

VincentEvans wrote: post #43

Congrats on launching! I just want to vent about something bank-related, and hopefully bait someone to tell me how this solves it. Or something else solves it. 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?…

At the bank I worked at, any payments made on the account that were above the due payment were applied directly on the account. But then you had people complain when they missed a payment because they put more money in the account to not miss the payment. You can't please everyone.

Banking is hard because everyone is doing it differently, and everyone is doing it. So you have to please older people that are used to calling or speaking to a bank teller and also please the younger generation who want to do everything online and not deal with humans.

The easiest way is to call when you want to do something the system is not expecting, because we had to manually adjust the final date of the loan, the amount due, and things like that. Terrible system and way more highly susceptible to human errors (trust me, I've seen a lot).

There were also a lot of silos (different departments) to do specific tasks, so you would get transferred a lot until somebody knew exactly who could handle your case. Most people were new recruits from University working part time, so they didn't know enough to answer most questions and when they did they usually had their degree so they switched jobs.

Post reply on HN