Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now I have an account now where I can deposit USDC and spend via tap to pay/debit card. Basically just a debit card linked crypto account, rewards are $$$ (4%) and adjusting balances is fast and easy. Also programmable so I can replace what is spent without having to manually transfer. This helps tremendously with managing the families access/budgeting of funds. Would also be nice to have an account where legac…
4% - where does that come from? Sounds too good.
Column – a chartered bank for developers
231–240 of 299 posts
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#232Hey, 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?
Use cases would be very helpful.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#233Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#234Hey 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!
Excited 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…
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#235Hey 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!
This 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 which is a B2B order mana…
I previously worked at Center (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.
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#236Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#237Congrats 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?…
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#238Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#239Congratulations on the launch! I wonder if this kind of business model, where it looks like there is basically "one really rich guy self-funding" for a couple of years, is going to be more common. That is, just looking at the site, my guess is that building everything from the ground up (core banking stack, acquiring the chartered bank, then all the APIs and tech on top of that) must have taken many years and many, m…
acquiring the chartered bank They seem to have bought Northern California National Bank in Chico, CA.[1] The Column web site doesn't mention it, but they still have a physical branch in Chico. The FDIC gives their web site as "norcalbank.com", although it does show the name change to Column. Their site has no street address and "domain name only" TLS certificate from Amazon, so you don't really know for sure that col…
Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think many starts ups are "rich people" self funding (or are parental funded). For instance Microsoft and Bill Gate's and Paul Allen's helped them out a lot. Ditto with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk's Tesla & Space X, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. You'll notice everyone aforementioned attended an Ivy League university.
Elon Musk did not found Tesla. He joined later after making an investment. Founded in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors, the company's name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment, X.com co-founder Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of the company and its chairman. He has served as CEO since 2008. [0] [0] https…
"A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five – Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk, and Straubel – to call themselves co-founders."