Many things that should be simple are complicated. Installing a printer, making croissants, building and managing a credit program across all 50 states. We bring good news on the credit front.
Column has launched three new capital products to simplify how companies offer, scale, and manage credit. These expand upon our existing credit origination product.
Historically, building a lending program that works across all 50 states meant stitching together a bunch of different licensed entities and capital providers to get your first product off the ground, then jumping from capital provider to capital provider as you scaled. This is a pain, so we streamlined the process to work with just a single partner — Column — or next to lines of credit from other providers.
Column is the first bank in the industry to offer a comprehensive solution for companies to scale capital in parallel with custom financial products: we originate the loans, provide both initial and scaled capital, and can integrate your financial products with our payments, deposits, and cards tech. Beyond just the capital, we’ll guide you through building a lending track record, managing compliance, proving underwriting, and figuring out how to scale a credit program — entirely tailored to your wants, needs, dreams, and use case.
We currently work with everyone from multi-billion dollar originators to companies offering their first credit products, with partners including Best Egg, Parafin, and Finvari. Our partners tend to choose Column on the strength of our national charter, balance sheet offerings, and especially our technical infrastructure.
New capital products
Column’s new lending offerings cover three products that can work separately or together: warehouse lines, forward flows, and loan retention.
Warehouse lines: Revolving credit that lets you fund loans before they’re sold or securitized. Column lends against the loan balance, typically at a discount, freeing up your capital and liquidity. These lines are secured by the financed loans and often act as the core of a lending business — our partners keep ownership of the loans and share both income and credit risk. Our sweet spot ranges from $5 million up to a couple hundred million, and after you scale past our limits, we’ll help you transition to financing from larger institutions that we can bring to the table.
Forward flow: Column agrees to purchase loans at set terms shortly after origination, taking on both income and credit risk. This gives lenders certainty around takeout, improves capital efficiency, and limits balance sheet risk. Forward flows suit lenders seeking faster cash cycles or diversified funding, and work well on their own or complementing an existing warehouse line.
Loan retention: When Column originates loans through lending partnerships, we can either sell or retain those loans. In this model, Column retains loans that would otherwise need balance sheet capital from our partners. This gives partners access to capital without additional legal agreements or counterparties, a more efficient alternative to warehouse lines or forward flows.
These three offerings complement our credit origination partnerships, where Column works with companies to originate loans and credit cards to businesses and consumers in all 50 states. In the past, we’ve helped customers with third-party capital markets transactions like sales, financing, or securitizations. Now, with capital options in the quiver, Column supports your entire lending lifecycle from application through payoff.
On the operations side, Column’s payments and automation infrastructure lets us offer faster and more frequent fundings, creative transaction structuring, more transparency with automated reporting and funding, and greater availability for clients to reach us through shared Slack channels and real-time comms.
Plus, if you’re also interested in building parallel financial products (payment flows, deposit accounts, card programs, etc.), we’ll help you create the program you want. Partner banking is a core part of our business, so speed, collaboration, and discretion is in our DNA, and we’re maximally flexible and transparent on terms.
Who we’re already working with
From seed-stage fintech to mature lender, we speak your language. Current partners include:
Best Egg, one of the largest consumer lenders in the country, turned to Column on the strength of our infrastructure and balance sheet offerings. Column originates credit cards and loans as Best Egg’s bank partner and provides capital by retaining and financing those loans. We combine retained loans with more bespoke financing to fit Best Egg’s needs.
Column also provided the first forward flow commitment to Finvari, a fintech that works with construction companies to automate payments and expense management through a spend management and corporate card platform, to buy receivables and fund capital needs. We first made a multi-year commitment to meet Finvari’s needs at the time, and have since upsized and renewed the commitment as Finvari grew.
As part of a collaboration across multiple banking products, Column originates accounts and serves as the BIN sponsor for Parafin’s new commercial credit card, the Spend Card. We worked with Parafin to develop a white-labeled solution for their partner platforms to offer small business customers an attractive and customizable card product.
And we’re ready to start working with you! Reach out to start building or keep growing with Column.