Column: The Bank Built by Engineers, for Engineers Moving $4.5 Trillion a Year
Most people have never heard of Column. But if you’ve used Brex, Mercury, or Ramp, you’ve touched its infrastructure without knowing it.
Column (column.com) is a U.S.-based, nationally chartered bank that sells itself less like a bank and more like developer infrastructure an API you plug into to move, hold, and lend U.S. dollars, without the layers of middleware and sponsor-bank bureaucracy that most fintechs have to work around.
Here’s The Idea:
Column was quietly built starting around 2019 by Plaid co-founder William Hockey and his wife, Annie Hockey, formalized in 2021 when the couple spent about $50 million of their own money to buy a tiny one-branch bank in Chico, California, and launched publicly in April 2022 under the Column name. No venture capital. No sponsor-bank middlemen. Just a bank run like a software company.
Instead of fintech startups stitching together a sponsor bank, a card processor, and other vendors, they can plug directly into Column’s APIs to open accounts, move money, issue cards, and even lend all under one roof, with FDIC insurance built in.
The Results Speak for Themselves
Column now moves over $4.5 trillion a year, claims 99.999% uptime, and generated an estimated $153 million in revenue in 2025. It’s the invisible engine behind some of America’s biggest fintech names.
For Nigerian fintech watchers, Column is a familiar pattern with a twist. Companies like Anchor and Brass have built “bank-as-a-service” layers here too but they typically sit on top of a licensed partner bank. Column skipped that step entirely by becoming the bank itself.
As global fintech infrastructure gets more competitive, Column’s model own the license, own the tech, skip the middlemen is worth watching.
It’s a real, nationally chartered bank, not a fintech partnering with one. Customers’ accounts sit directly under Column’s charter and FDIC insurance.
It has no outside investors. Column is entirely founder- and employee-owned a deliberate contrast to venture-backed “banking-as-a-service” (BaaS) providers.
