CEO of Column here! Have hired a couple amazing people off of HN recently, feel free ping me 1:1 at william [at] column dot com or ping in the comments.
Column looks very good. The API first approach is something that has been absent from banks and financial institutes for a long time now. I have worked with a lot of established banks trying to integrate their payment systems with newer tech. I would love to work on stuff that Column is doing. Have sent an email to you Wiiliam.
As some one who has interacted with banks and worked at o e, I think it’s really cool what you’re doing. Banks (and other companies in the financial sector) are stuck in the 90s in a lot of ways.
Too bad it’s not remote, I would love to contribute to this.
Appreciate it - its a fun, but hard problem! Yeah we're pretty hardcore on in-person in SF, which I isn't optimal for most people. As we get larger we may get more flex :)
I have been working on something similar as a side project and would love to connect with you and chat more about this. I have already sent you an email. Thanks!
This looks awesome, I have had numerous issues with large banks messing up account settings/payment so looking forward to this growing. I don't want to clutter up the comments with questions I have about a role here so you should have an email.
You can apply to my company, Carebrain! Looking for a full stack founding engineer. Will support Canadians including TN status. See full job description and apply here https://wellfound.com/l/2AGnAW
Founder of a developer bank, Column N.A. here. If people are interested in starting to build on FedNow hit us up. column.com/fednow and my email is william at column dot com .
Do you support cannabis business? Or rather, those of us who provide services too cannabis businesses? Some folk (eg: Stripe, Twilio) frown on even using their platforms for things next-to (but not touching) cannabis.
It's interesting to compare this comment with one of the other top comments on HN right now, an explanation of how Google's culture of promoting users for solving "hard problems" is ultimately a terrible, terrible strategy for their users and their company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31262428
As engineers, we should to step away from our egos and our desire to do something "interesting" and focus on where our solutions actually solve real problems, like Stripe's products (often, not always!) do. Whether something is "middleware" or "not interesting" has nothing to do with how useful or valuable it is.
I'm sure there are plenty of people working at Plaid who are really interested and dedicated in working on the kind of middleware that their co-founder is denigrating here. It's a shame they have to work for a company where that kind of polish is pushed aside in favor of ambiguous "innovation". As an engineer and a customer, I know which kinds of companies and engineers I want on the other side of the table when considering business partners, and—going solely from your comment—it sounds like Plaid isn't one of those companies.
Yeah, have to say, the level of knee jerk defensiveness here and on Twitter from cofounder level figures from Plaid does not exactly evoke confidence in their ability to outcompete.
It's probably financially optimal to put a nice veneer on an existing solution than to make something whole-cloth. They're running a business, not a charity, and besides -- as the consumer, why would you care? All you see is the facade anyways; unless you're making a point that the API's are actually leaky abstractions and the facade isn't that good (and I would respect that argument, if it were the case).
lots of respect for what you and the team have built at Plaid, but this is exactly the opportunity. As a developer who's worked at multiple fintechs and integrated with Plaid more times than I care to remember, it's an incredibly frustrating experience.
Ask any fintech and they'll tell you - Plaid is simultaneously the best and worst vendor they use. Best because there's no real alternative, but worst because it causes so, so, so many headaches with how unreliable the product is. The time spent building product workarounds at every company to account for Plaid issues is tremendous.
If Stripe thinks they can build something better, then I'd really love them to try.
Edit: William (co-founder of Plaid) seems to have deleted his comment, but it was basically accusing Stripe of repeatedly copying other companies.
Yodlee is the lesser evil here... it still disconnects accounts frequently and data is only pulled every ~12 hours.
I'm the co-founder of Realize (https://realizefi.com/), we tried using all of these APIs for our first app and found them to be super broken. Our API uses a mix of brokerages public and private APIs, which allows us to provide reliable connections and pull data in real time.
Yodlee is not the lesser evil. I have read through privacy and contracts from Yodlee, Plaid, and MX in the past.
MX as a company, are the real good guys. There is no packaging of data for third party use that has ever occurred. In fact, I'm looking through due diligence packages from MX right now and I can confirm what I am saying.
Yodlee was caught. Plaid was caught. I do not yet know about Finicity.
GP clearly retracted his statement. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, what I'm much more sure of is people will be far too careful in expressing thoughts if the moment it's out there it will be forever imprinted into the internet and associated with themselves. I wonder if it's possible for truly ephemeral messaging wiped-clean when you would like, given the issues with someone just writing it down physically.
If Stripe knows how to pay developers appropriate salaries (this is the under-discussed reason for SV companies being the only ones who can make good APIs - BoA is never going to pay their web team more than they pay their web team's department head, that is not possible for their culture) to develop appropriate interfaces on things, then more power to them if they can do very simple things to profit in the context of the oversights of other companies.
I've wondered why Stripe and Square are more successful than their older competitors, considering they don't have a moat and there's nothing particularly special in the space for them to invent. It seems like it is just that the older companies aren't willing to try to improve.
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!
Thank you for being so responsive in this comments thread.
One other minor (accessibility) thing on the Status page: The dropdown (Sandbox/others) doesn't get hinted with Vimium (a keyboard accessibility add-on for fox and Chrom) or also with qutebrowser (a keyboard-first browser)
There's some info about it here, but it's basically it's made as a <div>
Nope! We're a bank not an issuing processor (its pretty confusing...), we don't wrap any vendors or 3rd parties. However, they're an excellent issuing processor so a bunch of our customers use them and us together.
