In the US (and most countries) in order to get access to the central bank (in the US the fed) and do 'banking things' like holding money, moving money, and lending money you have to have a banking charter. We have a national charter (issued by the OCC) but you can also have some other more bespoke charters as well!
I believe they're looking to imply here that they own their own charter, rather than renting someone else's, which is how almost all U.S. fintech companies operate (look in the website footer of, say, Unit and you'll see: "Banking services are provided by Unit's partner banks who are Member FDIC.")
this is an important point. There are other providers who offer programatic creation of bank accounts, payments, etc. But all existing solutions wrap a bank, who then wrap middleware providers and core systems. When you work with Column, you're working with only Column. This has implications for cost (fewer people taking a slice of the pie), performance/usability/experience (modern, tightly integrated systems), and development velocity (fewer players in the game of Telephone). Column collapses the layers of the financial services stack and exposes this functionality via API.
I’m sure costs is part of the equation but I’d imagine the control is far more important. Reselling legacy bank services means you’re limited to what they can do, which is usually not much. Most finance technology is heavily limited by what they can do… because of their partners, and that’s why they’re usually just nicer interfaces to the same old services. Hence banks like Monzo in the UK building their own infrastructure from the ground up too. The less you’re dependent on legacy technology, the more you can do.
