Column – a chartered bank for developers

I don't have any inside knowledge, and obviously you can burn many millions even with a small team but:

"We started building Column in 2019 and launched in 2022." [0]

"We’re only six engineers (seven if you count me…but I’m a weekend code pusher)" [1]

[0] https://column.com/company/ [1] https://column.com/blog/hiring-at-column/

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).

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!

Truth is, we probably aren't great as a personal checking account, and thats not really the intended use case. But you are welcome to try us out and see what you can build!