Column – a chartered bank for developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#111

Post by politician » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76

whockey wrote: post #8

Hey 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!

I see you mention this in your docs, but do you provide any tools for the compliance side that would be required to use your API? E.g. if opening accounts on behalf of customers, all of those customers need to go through KYC. Do you monitor transactions for BSA/AML, or is that up to the user of the API? Thanks very much!

Their docs lay out the list of regs: https://column.com/docs/guides/bank-accounts#compliance--leg...

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#112

Post by fierro » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

lachyg wrote: post #88

tome wrote: post #66

Earlier 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.")

this is an important point. There are other providers who offer programatic creation of bank accounts, payments, etc. But all existing solutions wrap a bank, who then wrap middleware providers and core systems. When you work with Column, you're working with only Column. This has implications for cost (fewer people taking a slice of the pie), performance/usability/experience (modern, tightly integrated systems), and development velocity (fewer players in the game of Telephone). Column collapses the layers of the financial services stack and exposes this functionality via API.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#113

Post by VincentEvans » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

melony wrote: post #75

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?…

Try this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30685921

Thank you for that! This seems to be exactly targeting the problem i described!

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#114

Post by politician » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

whockey wrote: post #8

Hey 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!

I don't see a link on your website to Column N.A.'s legal disclosures. I'm trying to determine whether you have your own direct connection to FedWire/FedACH, are going through a 3rd party service provider like Fiserv/FIS, or are going through another bank.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#115

Post by alberth » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

whockey wrote: post #8

Hey 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!

Looks fantastic and the onboarding is great.

Can you talk a bit more about how KYC works at Column.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#116

Post by Asafp » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

earthboundkid wrote: post #38

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!

How much COBOL do you have to write on a daily basis?

Hi, I am an Engineer at Unit.co, a company that also builds Banking as a Service. I can share that not only we do not use COBOL, but our entire backend is written in Pure Functional Scala (and typescript for UI).

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#117

Post by Asafp » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

igrav55 wrote: post #96

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!

This looks awesome! A few questions: - Will there be an openapi spec to generate clients in most languages? - Do you support depositing checks via the dashboard? - Out of curiosity, what database are you using for high availability?

Hi, I am an engineer at Unit.co, a company that also builds Banking as a Service. We use PostgreSQL as database, and currently thinking about adding ElasticSearch to allow our users to do text search.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#118

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

fierro wrote: post #110

chirau wrote: post #101

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#119

Post by Asafp » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

drogus wrote: post #3

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!

Looks interesting! Do you plan to create an SDK? Or is interfacing with the HTTP API will be the best way to use the app for now?

No post body was provided.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#120

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, Apr 21, 2022, 6:26 PM UTC

whockey wrote: post #8

Hey 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!

I'm a little confused about who your customers are.

Do I have this right?

- Competent to develop and manage AML, KYC programs

- Wants to handle underwriting, fraud, compliance & operational risk exposure

- Develops software

- Doesn't want to talk to ACH & VISA

- Operates only in the US

Who is that?