| So this is what Will wanted to do when he left Plaid. Having the financial means to "buy" a bank certainly helped. Nice! Getting a new bank charter since the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has been virtually impossible. The number of banks in the US in the past decade or so has come down from ~6K to ~4K. New licenses for banks (State or Federal ) since 2008 have been negligible. So, let's buy a "small" bank. So far so good Next part is core banking software as well as Money movement software. This is where is gets interesting. Smaller banks use Fiserv/FIS/Jack Henry (and a long tail of other core banking providers) and larger ones have a mix of systems with legacy cores e.g. DXC, Misys and bunch of others. While it's tempting to build an entire banking stack from ground up it may not pass regulatory and compliance muster for a while. Plus even some the legacy cores have now built a rich RESTful API. Would be interesting to know how much of the core was built in house over the past 3 years Next part is Money Movement. This is where ACH, Push to Card, Fedwire and RTP come in ACH isn't that bad. Most banks use ACH "aggregators" which in turn connect to one of the two ACH Operators. Once a bank has a business relationship with the Fed it's not tough to connect to these aggregators and simply sftp files to/from them Push to Card is available through VISA Direct and MC Send. Given their financial resources and fintech background it wouldn't be difficult to get a connection going there RTP would be an interesting one but a relatively easy one since the Clearing House is already used to working with multiple banks and have "plug-ins" So, now it all boils down to the business procedures and KYC/KYB on Fintechs that want to use Column's services. This can be done very efficiently online The T&Cs are heavily skewed in favor of column. Some of them may be unenforceable. But those can be negotiated |