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Column – a chartered bank for developers

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Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#181

Post by skybrian »

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…

Some context: Patio11 wrote a bit about how businesses can use virtual account numbers this week:

> This is generally done via a mechanism called Virtual Bank Accounts (VBAs), which are a product available from the banking industry in Japan, the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, and many other countries. You contract with your financial institution of choice to reserve a block of bank account numbers corresponding to a far smaller number of actual bank accounts. You give out those numbers to your customers rather than giving out your “real” bank account number. You then take action based on which account number your customers use.

> Due to technical and social issues within the financial industry, the banks offering VBAs generally expect you to bring your own implementation work at this point. Should you e.g. re-use VBAs within your block? They probably don’t have a straightforward answer to that question; up to you. Should you treat them as secrets? Up to you. Should you share them between customers? Up to you. What should you do once you know one of your VBAs has received a transfer? The bank will give you your money, what you do with the data is up to you.

> Stripe does basically the simplest thing that works: give each customer/business pairing a unique VBA, shared across all invoices for that pairing (to avoid e.g. a customer not updating their supplier management system with the new bank account number on the second month’s invoice). Use ability to introspect invoices (and their open/closed/etc state) and inferences to tie incoming payments to the invoice they’re most likely associated with. Kick all the exceptions to a human or computer system, whichever the user specifies.

https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/a-game-that-intentionally-...

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#182

Post by [deleted] »

fierro wrote: post #138
politician wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We connect directly to the Federal Reserve. No middleware (i.e Fiserv/FIS), no other banks.

[deleted]

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#183

Post by [deleted] »

instagary wrote: post #177
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!

Can you talk about instant ACH, why do some charter partners like Robinhood and Coinbase support it but other legacy banks don't? How is instant ACH different to regular? Also, is it true that ACH is not instant bank to bank – essentially the banks settle up at the end of each month with 1 giant transaction? What about P2P support via Zelle, I recently learned it's lipstick on a pig and basically ACH under the hood.…

[deleted]

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#184

Post by skybrian »

arcticbull wrote: post #57
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?…

> 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…

This is a form of leverage, but how do you use it in a low-risk way? Fixed income investments seem to be near zero, and maybe people don’t want to invest more in stock.

If the alternative is cash sitting in a bank account, paying off the loan looks better.

Edit: I looked at Series I, and it's variable rate with a 3-month interest penalty for early withdrawal, so you're not going to get 7% in the end. It seems worth doing a more detailed calculation.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#186

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

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

This is great. I designed a similar system at Simple and it pained me that it never got implemented.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#188

Post by jawspeak »

strzalek wrote: post #68
earthboundkid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Zero. The whole stack is built in golang from scratch and we integrate with FED over some... interesting protocols.

Using Fedline Command with Axway by chance? E.g. see https://www.frbservices.org/binaries/content/assets/crsocms/... matrix of ways to connect to the Fed.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#189

Post by lbotos »

civilized wrote: post #165
GregorStocks wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in Tiller Money https://www.tillerhq.com/ . They provide something very much along these lines, with the output being an auto-updating Google Sheet that you can do whatever you like with. You do still need to update credentials sometimes, but I've been using it for a few years and it works quite well.

I've never heard of this! I've seen millions of ads over the last few years, why haven't any of them been for this! I will check it out, thank you!

Do note that Tiller and Personal Capital both use(d?) the same mechanism to scrape data: Yodlee

https://www.yodlee.com/

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#190

Post by theonething »

mdaniel wrote: post #143
Brystephor wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit card networks offer a similar thing. They call it payment network tokens. Basically, the network gives the merchant/processor/store/etc a Uuid string that's an identifier for your credit card. Then the merchant sends that UUID string (the token) to the network and the network sends the real credit card details to the issuer for authorization. So instead of giving merchants real financial info, they just get a…

Yes, I've been making heavy use of that over the years, from Amex's early offering through Privacy.com and now Capital One's anemic offering There's still quite a few merchants which give it the evil eye since evidently one can distinguish them from "real" credit cards if the processor chooses to look, but it's better than nothing Column is the first I've ever heard of a bank offering this level of financial firewall…

Yeah, I use Privacy extensively and on rare occasions have been rejected by merchants because of their no gift cards allowed policy. So apparently that is the category Privacy virtual cards come under.
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