Column N.A.: The Developer Bank for BaaS Programs

Partner, Corporate & Commercial Law

In 2021 Plaid co-founder William Hockey made a move no fintech billionaire had dared before: instead of another startup he paid roughly $50M for a bank with a single branch in Chico, California — Northern California National Bank — and turned it into Column N.A., "the bank built by engineers". Today it is the quiet foundation under a visible slice of American fintech, from Brex accounts to Mercury's banking infrastructure.

Who they are and the license

Column N.A. is a nationally chartered bank: a national license supervised by the OCC, FDIC insurance, headquarters in San Francisco. The relaunch of the acquired bank went through a formal regulatory procedure — OCC Conditional Approval #1280 (2022) for the change in the composition of its assets and the expansion of operations. The public launch in April 2022 came with API documentation instead of a press tour: Column calls itself the only national US bank built specifically for developers of financial products, and that is close to an accurate description.

Two things set it apart from the entire sponsor-bank roster. First, no outside investors: William and Annie Hockey funded the acquisition and the capital personally; the bank is family-owned, with no venture cap table. Second, the technology: the core and ledger were written from scratch, the bank connects to the Federal Reserve rails directly (Fedwire, FedACH), and every operation — from opening an account to an international transfer — is an API call priced per use, like SaaS.

Programs and partners

• Brex — since June 2024, Brex Business checking accounts run on Column: no fees on ACH, checks and domestic wires.
• Plaid — a Column client for banking infrastructure (and shared DNA: Hockey co-founded both companies).
• Mercury — Column is one of Mercury's three partner banks alongside Choice Financial Group and Patriot Bank: your US LLC's Mercury account may physically sit at Column.

The product line for programs: FDIC-insured programmable accounts, ACH and Fedwire, international SWIFT transfers to 180+ countries in 135+ currencies, real-time payments (RTP, FedNow), FBO structures and deposit sponsorship, warehouse financing for lending programs, card programs and BIN sponsorship, check issuance.

Scale: per Sacra, net revenue doubled from $100M in 2024 to $200M in 2025, and Column became the largest originator of real-time payments in the US.

How the sponsorship works

The key word is direct. Column deliberately does not work through middleware (Unit, Treasury Prime, Synctera): a fintech integrates with the bank's API, and there is exactly one ledger — the bank's. After the 2024 Synapse collapse, when discrepancies between the platform's records and the banks' froze end-customer money, the absence of an extra layer became the model's main selling point.

Program customers' money sits in Column accounts — in FBO structures or on virtual accounts with per-beneficiary records; FDIC insurance passes through up to $250,000 per beneficiary. The bank's economics: fees per API call and payment traffic, deposit spread, and interchange — like any bank under $10B in assets it is Durbin-exempt, which matters for card programs.

Who gets in

Column is strictly B2B: neither companies nor individuals can open an account directly; the bank's client is a fintech or a brand with an embedded financial product. Selection is stricter than the market average: the bank wants programs with a mature compliance function of their own (BSA/AML and KYC/KYB on the partner's side under the bank's oversight), sustainable economics, and an engineering team able to work with a raw banking API without intermediaries.

The standard sponsor-bank oversight cadence — quarterly compliance testing, an annual review, audit rights — applies here too; more in the parent overview.

For non-residents the path into Column is indirect only — through its programs. The practical route is Mercury, which onboards non-resident founders of US LLCs; the Russian-client limits are the same: OFAC screening and no Russian money flows.

Risks and regulatory history

Formally the record is clean: no public enforcement actions against Column in the OCC registers as of mid-2026 — no consent orders, no cease-and-desist. In a market where nearly every key BaaS bank has been through an order (Cross River, Blue Ridge, Evolve, Sutton, Piermont), that is rare and a competitive asset in itself.

One honest caveat: industry press (Fintech Business Weekly) wrote in 2024–2025 about intensifying OCC supervisory attention to the bank as its BaaS portfolio grew. Non-public supervisory measures are common in US practice, so the absence of an order in the register does not equal the absence of a dialogue with the regulator.

The remaining risks are structural. Concentration: the business leans on a few anchor programs — Brex, Plaid, Mercury. The sole-owner model: fast decisions without a venture board, but also key-person dependence. And the industry-wide thread — FDIC attention to custodial accounts after Synapse: the proposed rule on per-beneficiary recordkeeping remains on the table, and Column's direct model looks advantaged rather than exposed there.

Related topics

• US Sponsor Banks: Partner Banks for Fintech and BaaS
• BaaS and Sponsor Bank: Banking Product Without a Banking License
• BIN Sponsorship: Card Issuance Under Third-Party License
• Cross River Bank: The Sponsor Bank Behind US Fintech
• Mercury

Prepared as an expert overview; not individual legal advice.