Why Column Built a Real Banking API for Property Managers w/ George Cheng

the founder of Ramp, Aaron Kleinman, he posted this article about like the— how the ice is breaking, right? There's going to be two camps forming. And they actually pulled real data based on Ramp's kind of customer data that, you know, customers share with Ramp where it's like customers that are using AI are actually seeing their revenue grow kind of 2 to 3x faster than their peers. And these aren't software companies he's talking about too. He's talking about like a roofing company in Utah, talking about a construction company, like talking about, you know, like a pool maintenance company that are leveraging AIs in different workflows and actually seeing their revenue and kind of profits grow even faster. And so I think this is just an interesting callout where it's like, you know, this tidal wave is coming for everybody, including for, you know, a lot of operators in property management as well, where folks, the more they start thinking about it and start leveraging some of these capabilities, that's actually going to also be a competitive advantage moving forward in the future.

Friends, welcome back to Peter Lohmann's podcast. Today I am here with George Chang. He's head of vertical solutions at Column Bank. George, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here, Peter, and great to see you again.

Yeah, it's great to see you as well. So Column Bank is a title sponsor of the PM Trends Report, and I wanted to get you on the show first. I want to thank you for sponsoring the report. We're excited to get this into the hands of property managers.

Of course.

But I also wanted to spend a good amount of time with you on the show getting into some of the details around Banking for property managers. We had an opportunity to chat recently and I got to learn a little bit more about what Column offers, and it got me interested in a couple different things. So why don't we start by just for anyone who maybe hasn't heard of Column or doesn't really know where you guys fit in the ecosystem, just let us know kind of the background and what you're working on over there for property managers.

Yeah, absolutely. Great question, Peter. So I would say, first of all, Colum, we are a nationally chartered FDIC-insured bank. What's really unique about us is our founding story. So the founder of Colum, William Hockey, is also the founder of Plaid, the $13 billion financial technology company. So what we did actually is we acquired a bank that had been around since the '90s, but in conjunction with that, in parallel to that, we actually built all of our own core banking software, our own payment processing, our own core ledger. All of the operating system when it comes to being a bank from the ground up. And what that really uniquely differentiates us is we're actually the only bank that fundamentally controls all of our underlying technology. And so when we first got started, our initial customers are some of the largest financial technology companies, including many tools that PM operators are using today, whether it's Build.com or AvidPay for processing vendor payments, the Bilt card that tenants are using to paying rent, or Flex splitting rent to installments, or even Wise for paying your international contractors or RT, uh, remote employees. And so all of these companies are actually built on top of our core banking software and our technology via our APIs, our balance sheets. But what was interesting was probably about, you know, 3 years ago we started getting inbound from technology-enabled property management companies, and that really got us thinking, and we very quickly realized that Property managers are actually physical financial technology companies. And what we mean by that is PMs are not only managing the properties on behalf of the owners, they're also managing the underlying funds flow, adding the fiduciary capacity, being regulated by the DRE or the Real Estate Commission, collecting rent on behalf of property owners, holding security deposits on behalf of tenants, doing distributions and vendor payments on behalf of the owners as well. And so with that, we decided to build a dedicated business unit with division within the bank, vertical solutions to really focus on serving the property management industry. So today we bank hundreds of property management companies with compliant trust accounts, with pass-through, you know, FDIC insurance and the whole gamut there. But then also really bring that unique technology that we built originally with financial technology companies in mind, but also to the property management space as well. So been doing this now for 3.5, 4 years and, you know, great to work with many of the best PM operators and also get to know folks like yourself.

Awesome. That's perfect background. So just make sure I understand correctly. So you guys are a bank, you're a nationally chartered bank, and, but your background is in technology. And yeah, Plaid is definitely familiar to property managers. That's the software that like when you're hooking up anything to a bank account or a credit card, you get to this like little screen where you kind of like log into your bank on this little like popup, that's Plaid. Yeah. And it, it's what lets you, like, for example, with Buildium, I believe they use Plaid to pull transactions in from our bank. We have a bank with Chase into Buildium so that we can reconcile them. So obviously, you know, very familiar with that technology side of banking. Your founder then went out and started Column, which bought a bank to get started and then rebuilt your own custom software to run all of the— basically like the AppFolio of the bank. Like, you built it, right? Rather than using off-the-shelf software, which is pretty antiquated and slow and not very set up for the modern age of APIs and things like that. So can you help me understand something? This is a little bit off tangent, but what, what differentiates a bank from some of these other bank-like institutions or companies that we deal with a lot, like PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, because these are companies that move money around. I can have an account with them with money in it, and it's— I'm always like, wait, are you guys a bank? Like, what? It's very confusing to someone who's not in the business.

Yeah, this is an excellent question, Peter. And so What it all kind of boils down to essentially is, you know, here in the States, in order to move money, hold money, or lend money, either have to be a bank or work with a bank. And so what's interesting about PayPal, Venmo, you know, Bill.com, any of these like financial technology or like neo-bank type applications like Chime that some consumers may have heard of, they basically built all of the frontend UI with the applications like the mobile apps you're using, the website that you're using. For kind of engaging with banking in more kind of online, kind of modern-friendly way. But behind the scenes, they still have to work with the bank. That's actually the infrastructure that's connected to the Federal Reserve rails with the FedMaster accounts where actually the money is actually moving, whether it's an ACH or a wire transfer or like a real-time transfer in this case. And so what's really interesting about Column is we are actually that banking infrastructure or that bank behind the scenes for a lot of these financial technology companies with these neobanks that you're mentioning, like the PayPals, the Venmos of the world. When you're, you know, sending money, you know, with one of these applications, that money's actually moving behind the scenes through Columns Rails. So we're processing, you know, $2.5 trillion annually across ACH, wires, real-time payments, FedNow transactions. And, but the important part is we're actually the bank itself too. So having that national charter, being a member of the FDIC, having FDIC insurance, and why that's really, really important in the property management space especially is because property managers are not only fiduciaries, but they're also regulated. So when it comes to things like Department of Real Estate, DRE compliance, making sure you have a compliant trust account that has a fiduciary designation on the banking core, you really have to work with a bank that deeply understands that nuance and have the actual core ledger to support the distinction. Because ultimately, whether you're using like a PayPal or a Venmo, if something goes wrong, like your funds are sitting at a bank. And so especially in property management, we're already a regulated fiduciary, Having that direct bank relationship is also very, very important.

Okay. That makes a lot more sense. I want to jump right into the thing that I found most interesting when we chatted last, which has to do with your API. So APIs are having a bit of a resurgence in the mind of the average business owner or consumer. It used to be APIs were this thing that only developers really cared about, and you'd hear about it once in a while. But even in the property management industry, the word has been on our lips for a long time because it has to do with our data specifically around our property accounting software. And a lot of property managers, even if they don't know the technical details, they understand that if they can interface with a piece of software through an API, that's powerful and it means their data and the actions they can take with that software are no longer locked up in having to use that software's user interface. You can control it programmatically. And so you were sharing with me that Column actually has an API that lets you do not just some things, but a lot of things and possibly everything that you could ever want to do through an API, which has a lot of interesting implications with AI and agents, which we're going to get into. But start by just telling a little bit about what is this banking API? Why would I care or need my bank to have an API? Who else has an API? Is it just you guys? Like, give me a little bit, pretend I don't know much about this 'cause I actually don't, and just let, let us know what's going on here.

Yeah, so maybe starting from the top a little bit here, like what is an API? So API is an application programming interface. Basically it's a fancy term for a connector or a way for you to easily access data or for softwares and machines to essentially talk to each other in a programmatic kind of structured data way. And so what's really important about APIs is inherently they're secure and permissioned, as in you have permission key scope to the APIs. So unlike, you know, like web scraping, for example, where you're just like using some sort of bot to scrape the internet with a scrape like your website, or even like the Agentic web kind of browsing capabilities where it's still someone like pointing and clicking, an API is essentially a permissioned way for, you know, softwares. And now with the AI era for AI agents, to actually securely access data that's living within a database or within a software or a system of record.

So you can create API keys with different levels of permission.

Exactly.

With Buildium, for example, uh, just cause we happen to be on Buildium right now, we can issue APIs that are read-only. We can issue APIs that have write access, and we can even narrow and scope it by different, you know, different capabilities even within that.

Exactly. And that is the permission part that is really, really important, especially our folks are where operators are getting into, you know, this trend around vibe coding, building your own custom software applications, finding ways to get data out of the system, especially when it comes to sensitive financial data and information. You don't want to just let an AI agent run wild, like across all of your trust accounts, especially these are trust accounts that we're talking about here.

And I want to try that with Open Claw. Yeah, I mean, let's be real. People have been writing about that and maybe had some bad experiences. Yep.

And so going back to one of your earlier questions too, it's like, hey, like, do other banks have APIs? Like, what is the state of the world essentially? And the short answer is no. And it's actually not the fault of banks themselves. It's because of the structural nature of what's happening in banking. And what I mean by that is when you think about banks, banks are inherently not technology companies. What banks are really good at is the relationships, bringing deposits from, you know, small businesses, consumers like you and I, and then lending out those deposits in the form of mortgages, SBA loans, you know, or kind of auto loans, you know, kind of home finance, construction, all of that. And the spread that they're making between the interest that they're earning on these loans versus the interest they're paying on deposits, that's like the core business model for most banks. And so when it comes to technology, what banks actually do is they're buying third-party technology from FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry. And these 3 companies control 80% plus of the banking software market. And every bank, whether it's Chase or Wells or your local regional or community bank, they're basically running on these existing softwares. And so when it comes to things like APIs, like they don't have control over their underlying technology and so they can't offer that. And so what happens is when you try to get information out of a bank, the human or you and I, we're essentially the API. We're downloading bank statements, we're downloading NACHA files, uploading to the bank, we're downloading CSV statements or maybe BAI-2 files or something like that.

Well, and Plaid was kind of a— Plaid was an attempt to streamline this a bit and does make things a lot better.

Yes, exactly. But the thing about Plaid is not all Plaid connections are built equal, right? For some Plaid kind of integrations, it's actually an API integration that Plaid built like directly into the bank. Others is more around kind of like a screen grab sort of integration. And so that's why depending on the bank that you're using, right, like the Plaid connection may work better or may not work as well too. And so what we did at Column was very different in that we said, hey, Instead of using FIS, Fiserv, or Jack Henry, like who are essentially middlemen if you think about it, 'cause they're like the technology middleman for a bank to actually interface with the Federal Reserve to send payments. We said, let's build that all from the ground up from first principles. Let's build our own technology, our own direct connections. And because we control an operating system, we can also expose all the capabilities to customers via like an API in a secure permissioned way.

Okay, let me pause you there 'cause like this is pretty exciting, right? I'm, I've got a background engineering and I'm slightly technical. This sounds Very exciting, right? Yeah, let's get in there. You know, screw these guys who are charging banks left and right for this antiquated software. It's a classic case of like, you know, incumbent versus upstart. Like, you know, you feel like you have no choice, you have to buy from one of these 3 vendors, but no, we're gonna, we're gonna do it ourselves. We're gonna figure this out, right? I love that.

Yeah.

That's like an entrepreneur, very entrepreneurial.

So, and on that point, Peter, actually, so sorry to, to cut you off.

Yeah.

Like when you think about like, you know, replacing your property management software is difficult. Mm-hmm. 'Cause that's your core operating system. Like, No one wants to switch from, you know, BuildVM to AppFolio or Redvine to, you know, another software or something like that. Like bank software is even stickier. Like, I kid you not, contracts, like these contracts from these software companies, the FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, these are like 10-year-plus committed contracts, right? And so you, you go to a bank and say, hey, I want you to switch your banking software to something totally brand new, modern, things like that. That's never going to happen, right? Because it's just such a big lift to have to do that, any sort of, you know, bank kind of core bank migration like that.

Well, and banks are conservative, and, and you want them to be conservative, right? Like, I don't, I don't want my bank messing around with upstart technology. I want to feel like it's going to be reliable and they're not going to accidentally have a bug or anything like that. So I get it. But couple like immediate questions that come up for me, which is like, why hasn't any other bank done this? Because it seems— I can only imagine that these three incumbent antiquated vendors are charging unbelievable pricing. We already heard about their contract terms, so I can only imagine their pricing. So surely some other bank has a CIO that's like, you know what, fuck these guys, we're going to build our own software. So what made Column or your, your founder, your founder group uniquely qualified or capable of doing this? And like, you know, just to be blunt about it, like, is this is this technology reliable? Like, because it just— it hasn't been around all that long. So should there be any concerns there?

Very, very good points, Peter. And so to answer your first part of the question, and let's get to the second. So in the first part, like, why other— why aren't other banks doing this right? Banks have been around for hundreds of years. They see the technology, they understand what's coming. Like, why aren't they just rebuilding their core banking software from the ground up? And so to answer that, I would say kind of split into two different categories. But these smaller banks, the community banks, the regional banks, they honestly just don't have the resources to do something like this. It's like way too big of a lift. And then you think about like the, the massive banks, the Chases, the Wells Fargos, the Bank of Americas. I mean, they're throwing off billions in earnings every year. Like they can invest in technology. And the answer is they actually do. If you look at JP Morgan's, you know, their quarterly earnings or annual reports, I think, you know, Jamie Dimon's on record saying they're spending something like $5 to $10 billion on technology alone, right? But the issue with that is you're basically building bolt-on technologies onto the legacy core, like from other kind of systems that you built out through acquisitions over the years. All the largest banks, whether it's Chase or Citi or Bank of America, they formed by acquiring a ton of different banks. And so you're bolting on, combining a bunch of different technology, and it's honestly darn near impossible to say, hey, we're going to rip all of that out and start from scratch without there being an actual business impact to running, you know, a trillion-dollar bank in that sense. And so we took a different approach to say, hey, we can essentially start fresh by building the technology in parallel because we acquired a bank, you know, and they were still running on their own technology. There was no business impact whatsoever. But then in parallel, we can actually build our own native technology off from the ground up. And you bring up a great point, right? It's, hey, this technology sounds new. You guys started building back in 2019. It's only been, you know, 6 years. Like, How reliable is this technology? And my answer to that is, if you look at like who we're processing transactions for, who's using our APIs and our software every day, it's truly the largest financial technology companies, and we're processing $2 trillion annually across our rails. And so we built a lot of— a lot of—

I need $3 trillion. I'm sorry. I'm looking for $3 trillion in volume.

Exactly. So it's a lot of kind of safeguards and technology that we have to build in. And in some ways, I would argue, because we've able to essentially not have any sort of legacy software overhang in our tech. We can just rethink everything from the ground up. It's actually— we can build in a lot more scalable and safer way moving into the future as well. And so that'd be my response to the safety question, the scalability question.

Okay. All right. So bringing this a little bit, you know, closer to home for property managers.

Yeah.

You know, trust accounting is the core of what we do as property managers. The main software that we use is property management trust accounting software, right? Buildium, Appfolio, Rentvine, Propertyware, Rent Manager. These are the heart of our technology stack, and their number one core function is to deal with trust accounting. And that means handling bank transactions, reconciling them, accounting for them, creating them, etc. So share a little bit about what you— so we talked about the background of your technology, but I want to learn more about what it can do for property managers. What are some of the things that if we're going to get to sort of what this means for the average property manager, but let's pretend you're a super tech property manager and you know how to use all these AI agents and you know how to a little bit about how to program. What could you do with a bank that has an API like Column?

Yeah. So even before we get into that technology real quick, Peter, just want to emphasize one point. I think regardless of how amazing technology is or how incredible the APIs are, how straightforward anything is, It all has to start with a deep understanding of the property management space and the compliance implications. Like trust account compliance is no joke, right? Because property managers are not just dealing with their own money, they're fiduciaries dealing with beneficiaries, which are the property owners and their funds. And so having your accounts set up as proper trust accounts so it's eligible for pass-through FDIC insurance. So each of your owners are insured up to $250K and making sure that your bank actually has that fiduciary designation on their banking core. Like that is table stakes, right? Like none of the technology matters without getting that right. So that's actually the first thing that even with a, call it a technology-forward operator or one of these, you know, AI whizzes, uh, the, we kind of set the stage with that. That's super important. And at Column, we take that extremely seriously with their entire legal regulatory compliance team built around this, but kind of get to the more fun part of the answer around, hey, what does this enable that you couldn't do before? Right. And so especially when you think about trusted accounting and financial operations in this agentic AI that we're moving into, in our conversation, Peter, I think you brought up an excellent point where accounting is one of those domains where AI theoretically should have a ton of value creation. Yeah, it's inherently, you know, rules-based, it's systematic, data is structured. There's a ton of historical transaction, historical reconciliation. This is like the prime area for AI to actually you know, be very, very valuable essentially. I was gonna ask for that. Yeah.

As property managers, we've, we've, we haven't seen that yet.

We haven't seen that yet.

We've seen almost nothing. Like we, we have these, you know, chatbots and when they're writing emails for us and stuff, but like the one area that I felt like should be the easiest to attack, which is accounting, there's been no movement as far as I'm aware.

Yeah. And so like, exactly to your point, Peter, like all the innovation so far has been on the front office and property management, AI leasing tools. Maintenance triage tools, tenant communications, you know, CRM kind of AI workflows, which is all really important and fantastic too. It's a core part of property management. But when we think about why that hasn't happened on the accounting side, and it's actually because there's a big gap. And what I mean by that is when you think about what accounting means, so in your accounting software, with your property management software, it tells you everything at what should happen. Like rent is due on the 1st, you have a vendor payment that's going out for $3,500. If everything goes well, this is what should happen. but your bank, the data at your bank that tells you what actually happened. Yeah. That rent, when did it actually get in? When did it actually settled? When did that owner distribution get cleared? What was the actual amount that it cleared the bank at? Yeah. So the owner has their distribution, you know, in cold hard cash, like at their bank account. That's what's actually happened. So in order to do truly kind of trust accounting and reconciliations the automated way, you need to be able to connect those two gaps. Bridge the gap essentially between your property management software and the data that's in there and your bank with the data that's in your bank as well. And historically there was no way to access that bank data in a very kind of programmatic, systematic, and even more importantly, real-time way, right? You, you kind of had Plaid, which, you know, was a really, really good solution depending on the layer of integrations you have. But again, it's not real-time data. It refreshes, you know, once 24 hours, whether you're using Apple's Bank Feed or Billium's, you know, kind of auto recon solution. And a lot of transactions are still getting kind of missed when it could easily auto-match. But now when you have APIs, what we're actually seeing some of our, you know, existing customers doing, including one example of this PM company managing just over 5,500 doors, they're actually taking that data from their property management software, whether it's Rentvine or Appfolio, via API, building an interface and connecting that with the data they're pulling in directly via APIs that call them with the view-only permission, auto-matching all the transactions that match. That part is fairly straightforward. If you use Bank Feed before, you get that. But where the real unlock is, is where you're spending all your time on the exception processing. When something doesn't match, when there's a variance, when there is a transaction in the bank that's not reflected as a journal entry in your property management software, or vice versa. And that is where AI can be really special. So what we've seen this customer do is we worked with them to actually build an AI reconciliation assistant that when it catches a variance, it's able to immediately pull and get the context. For example, there's a $7 variance. This is actually a State Farm invoice processing surcharge that gets added to the ACH pull but wasn't reflected in your initial bill. Here's your recommended actions for what you can do to go into your software and get it fixed, right? Or there's a $200 transaction that is at the bank but not in your property management software where as a journal entry— oh wait, this was actually a refund for an overpayment from Home Depot. Right. So now here's the recommended actions for creating that journal entry in AppFolio, and then you're matched. And we can take that one step further, right? Because right now you can say, hey, these are the recommended actions. Human goes, does that. But, you know, with the power of Agentic AI, you can actually have an agent kind of reconcile that transaction directly within your property management software, create that offsetting journal entry, and then you have the human in the loop in the final approval step as well. So I think when it comes to accounting and reconciliation, there's a ton of automation capabilities there. And that actually also has a very real compliance implication because instead of doing reconciliation once every month, very reactive, when you get audited, when a DRE auditor comes and say, hey, show me your books, scrambling to pull together all the information. Now you can actually do trust accounting and compliance in like an automated, non-reactive way, in a proactive way where you can actually just have the system reconcile like every night, or even in real time as transactions are clearing the bank. And I think that is actually a fairly massive unlock because at the end of the day, when I talk to PM operators, no one really gone to this business to be an accountant, right? Like folks love building the owner relationships, growing the door count, working with the tenants, and that accounting becomes actually a very core part of the overall workflows. And that's why we've seen a massive industry get built around third-party kind of specialized trust accounting firms for helping PM operators kind of handle the back office side.

Yeah, couple reflections on that. At the very end there, you mentioned something that I've always found interesting, which is we have this accounting software, Buildium, Appfolio, Rentvine, etc., and yet we still spend so much time and money on accounting, right?

Yeah.

And like, no hate to any of those players. They're all doing a great job and they're working with what they've got. But I'm spending money left, right and center to do accounting, right? When presumably the software companies that specialize in accounting should be making it easy. I pay a company called APM Help every month thousands of dollars to do our trust account daily bank recs. I pay Profit Coach thousands of dollars every month to do our corporate accounting. And that's actually, you know, pretty close to, if not more than what I pay the software companies themselves. So like from an— if you're looking at this from the perspective of like software vendor, you're like, wow, there's a lot of TAM still available in property management accounting. It's just been disguised because it's not on the software sort of line item on my P&L. It's on the services and contractors. And like, it's a totally— we think of it differently. We're like, oh no, that's just like our accounting company. Like, but that could be done by software.

100%. Yeah.

So that's the first thing. And the other thing I think is really interesting when you think about the software that we use every day, and the bank underneath it that we bank with, they're very disconnected. And like you touched on some of it, which is like the reconciling part, but there's a whole other, uh, there's a whole other category of things that we're doing every day that could be better if our bank was more tightly integrated with our software. And I'm just sort of like complaining to you for a minute. This doesn't really have anything to do with Calm.

Please go for it.

When I send a security deposit to a tenant, like a security deposit refund, we're doing like this check printing, you know, whether it's remote check printing or we're printing it on a laser printer here at the office, putting it in the mail. Or even if you're doing it by ACH, you're generating that ACH from within your property management software, and then that goes out and your bank has no idea what's going on. The bank's going to see some random withdrawal to some third-party payment processor, Forte or whatever it is. And the bank's going to be like, I don't know what this is. And then that's that reconciliation part. But you know, everything from even the other way, rent coming in, right? Rent is not coming directly into my Chase bank account. Nope. It's going through a third-party bank payment processor controlled by Buildium. And then again, it just gets dumped into Chase, you know, once a day in a lump transaction. And Chase is like, I don't know what this is. And if you're lucky, Buildium correctly did the math to figure out that this transaction matches this transaction in Chase. By the way, that doesn't always work properly with Buildium and it's off by a few cents. And then the next day it's like corrected by that same— that's fine. Ask any professional trust accountant about that. So there's a huge opportunity to bring a core function of what we do as property managers, which is trust accounting and accounting in general, bring the software that, you know, oversees that, which is our buildings and our portfolios, and the bank that handles those transactions, and bring those two things closer together. And so whether it's you guys or somebody else or AppFolio or however this needs to happen, just as somebody who's in it every day, like, please, can we get together on this, guys, and like make this a little bit more streamlined? Because it is ridiculous. It is ridiculous that we're spending all this money with the software companies and the accountants and spending so much time chasing down these transactions. It's just like for something that's core to what we do every day, it's in shambles, to be honest.

Yeah. And Peter, you really nailed it, right? And it, it's also not just like the lack of visibility that you're describing here too. It's also the speed when it comes to payment processing, whether it's rent clearing or owner distribution. Because now again, there's another middleman, right? It's the payment processor, whether it's Forte or Jack Henry or whatever payment processor your property management software is using, they're basically holding the funds for a certain period of time before dispersing the funds into your trust accounts at your bank. And so now not only are you obfuscate, like obfuscating like the visibility of the transaction, there's also a delay. So one common, you know, complaint we hear from our customers is like, man, like it should not take 3 to 5 days for owner distributions to clear. My property management software.

Yeah, I don't care about that. I get those owners need to just calm down. If you can't wait 3 days for money to hit your account as a rental owner, you shouldn't be owning rental property. So I don't really care about that. It would be nice if it was instant. That'd be nice. But, you know, I think it's okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think, you know, some operators get like a lot more complaints and to each their own. Yeah, I totally hear you on that. But it goes back to that point, right? Because now you have a third-party processor that's not connected anybody just being that middleman. Essentially what should really happen is your bank is directly connected with your accounting software, your property management software that you're already using. So now you have that connected ecosystem between the two. And so, yep, that is absolutely something that we're very, very actively working on and there's a lot more to come on that front.

Okay, cool. So in terms of the API, are there any property management specific software solutions built on top of your API right now, or is it mostly just like property managers, you know, creating their own software for internal use?

Yeah. So there's a lot there that I am— I unfortunately can't share too much kind of detail.

Yeah, you can. You can.

There's more.

They told you you could, right?

But the short answer is like, absolutely. That is something that could happen, right? Just like a financial technology company integrating to our APIs, a property management software can integrate directly into our APIs and offer as a native capability within their software. So when it comes to rent collection or vendor payments or owner distributions, instead of seeing those lump sum transaction where the bank has no visibility into, they could be individual ACH kind of API calls. So you could actually have the entire ledger with every kind of transaction in there without it being like this, you know, giant lump sum where you have no visibility into. So the short answer is yes. And then you can also build a lot of native reconciliation capabilities, native agents to help you with reconciliation. So All of that is, is, is happening without going into too much detail there. But I think the important thing to call out is there's always going to be a lot of different property management softwares, always a lot of different tools, different folks at different preferences. And that's why we're focused on being a, like a bank that supports, you know, any platform that you want to use. So whether you're using Rentvine or Appfolio or Buildium or Doorloop, kind of name your next-gen property management software, as long as you can get information out of your platform via APIs, you can connect that information however you want along with our bank APIs as well too. And that is very, very core to what we do because ultimately it's important for PM operators to have a choice in who they want to work with.

What are some of the more interesting use cases that you're seeing property managers take advantage of with Column?

Yeah, so we already talked about the automatic reconciliation one. I think that's huge when it comes to streamlining the trust accounting, the recon. But another one that's really, really interesting that we're seeing too is some of our customers have almost essentially built like a CEO, CFO level dashboard that has all the information from their property management software that they're kind of extracting programmatically and, you know, with unit count, delinquency rates and things like that. But then they're supplementing that with information from the bank. So they have a true kind of like one single pane view of everything that's happening across the different softwares, whether it's, you know, their property management software, their CRM solution or, you know, kind of PropertyMeld, their maintenance solution, they can kind of connect all those different systems in like one unified holistic view. That's great to have visibility over everything. And so now when you're connected, you know, the delinquency rate from your property management software with the actual collections data you see the bank, you get a lot more visibility. And so in some ways what we're seeing is, you know, in larger companies there are these like FP&A, financial planning and analysis, where strategic finance functions, where you're using financial data to make decisions on where to invest. And essentially some of our PM operators have automated that and kind of built it into a dashboard with like a little kind of finance, strategic finance agent that's analyzing the data from the bank and the different softwares they're using to help them make decisions, including things like, hey, we identified that, you know, you've been, you're charging this owner this amount of management fee for, for, for this long now. You have an uplong, you have an upcoming kind of renewal cycle and market comps actually is this amount for the owner. The management fee rate. And so you have an opportunity potentially to increase your revenue with this set of owners. So little things like that we're actually seeing where they're able to connect and get information out of Columnview APIs so they can actually have that holistic view with a decision-making CEO, CFO level dashboard. That's just another example that we're seeing.

Yeah, CEOs always want to know what's the balance in the bank account. It's a pretty important—

you know the drill, Peter—

piece of data on a dashboard for a CEO. Okay, so I want to ask, like, to play devil's advocate for a minute, if it were the case that an Appfolio, Rentvine, etc., was able to be super tightly integrated with your bank or another bank, you know, on, on the one hand, that's great. I just talked about how awesome that would be and all the unlocks, you know, that you shared. On the other hand, Does that give them a little more leverage over me? Right. So right now, if I want to switch from Buildium to AppFolio, for example, I could do it. It'd be painful. You know, we may get there, but my bank would stay the same. Right. And when I think about the pain of switching my property accounting software and the pain of switching banks, to me, they're like pretty close. Yeah. They're like tied for number 1 and number 2 of like worst possible thing I could ever do as a property management business owner in terms of like pain and suffering and time and hassle and everything else. So if I had to switch both at the same time, it would, it would basically be infeasible. Like, I don't even know if it would be doable. So is, is there that concern as well? Like, is there going to be some type of portability where it's actually easier to switch property accounting software because of the underlying API or something like that? Like, help me explore this a little bit.

Yeah. It's a really good point that you're making, Peter. And I think this goes back to a little bit of what I was saying earlier too, where it's like Column, we have accessible APIs. You go on our website, column.com/docs, you'll see all of our API capabilities available that you can start using. And when we are a banking and property management company, we also have that direct bank relationship with that property management operator and their, you know, employees of the company as well. So we take that relationship banking component really, really seriously. So even in a world where let's say, you know, the bank is tightly integrated with the property management software, so you can do a lot of banking capabilities directly outta your software. And actually in the HLA space, that happens quite a lot, a lot more than the residential property management space. You're still gonna have that direct bank relationship as well too, right? You have the relationship banker that you can call because inevitably there's always something that's gonna happen with like a late return or like a check adjustment that needs to be made. I don't think there's any scenario where you're going to want to rely on your property management software, also the bank that you're talking to every day, because that banking relationship is also very, very essential, especially longer term when you're talking about lending credit opportunities. If you want to acquire some of your own buildings, like having that relationship is super core as part of relationship banking. And so what I mean by that is because of the fact we have APIs that are accessible, you can always use those APIs. Like even if you end up deciding that, you know, the current system of record with the software you're using may not be the best fit for your long-term goals. You're still going to have that direct native banking relationship with Colum directly. And I think that part is very, very important. Exactly to your point.

Okay, let's get a little more into like the specifics of what you guys offer for property managers. So we've heard a lot about the APIs and sort of your tech origins. Property managers are interested in analysis banking for their trust accounts with big balances, right?

Of course.

Tell a little bit about what's on offer, what products you have for property managers in that regard.

Yeah. And so when it comes to analysis checking, I think the common term folks use is earnings credits or earnings credit rates, ECR, analysis credits. The term kind of varies, but essentially it's a way to almost get reimbursed for the software, you know, the accounting-related spend that you're doing, whether it's a third-party accounting or your property management software and all of that when you're keeping substantial balance in the bank. And so the short answer is we also offer a competitive earnings credit program. We're actually a zero-fee bank when it comes to property management clients. And so we don't charge you per transaction, per check deposit, you know, per stop payment, like any of those, those kind of just go away. And on top of that, there is that competitive earnings credit program as well. We're able to get reimbursed a compliant, you know, DRE compliant, real estate commission compliant way, because you're not earning explicit interest on your trust account. That's obviously a big no-no given these are fiduciary funds that belong to the beneficiaries. So that's number one. I would say number two though, what we really see the ROI from our property management clients, but where they see the ROI isn't so much in the earnings credits. 'Cause let's say your earnings credits is, you know, 2 or 3%, you're keeping a million in balances, that's $20,000, $20,000, $30,000 a year, which is not nothing, right? But where they really see the ROI is actually integrating into our APIs, automating and streamlining a lot of their workflows. So now they can free up their accountants with their other employees to do actually a lot more strategic revenue generating tasks. And so the best example I can give is, hey, you can scale from 300 doors to 500 doors. That's a 67% increase in door count or 67% increase in revenue. If you can do that without also scaling your headcount linearly, that's also a 67% increase in your EBITDA or profit margins. And that is going to well more than offset any sort of benefits you're getting from the earnings credit side. And so that's how our clients are thinking about it. So it comes down to competitive earnings credits, a lot of technology, And the important thing too isn't we kind of give you the APIs and leave folks on the island. I think there's folks like, you know, yourself or Todd or Wolfgang who love just kind of getting in and building and vibe coding. But there's also a lot of folks where honestly it scares them. They don't know where to start. And that's also where we have our entire solutions engineering team that we actually work with our customers side by side. We, you know, fly out, meet them in person, spend a day with them, deeply understand their workflows and help them build a lot of these automations and capabilities too. And so that alone also is very incredible value that our customers are seeing. Okay. And, and so I would say that those are some of the key things for property management companies.

Okay. So just to keep it real for a minute, most property managers aren't set up to do that. They're not gonna be able to take advantage. I think it's awesome that you guys do that. They're not gonna be able to take advantage of a, like a forward deployed engineer coming to their office and helping them set up APIs and stuff like that. Most property managers need off-the-shelf software that can take advantage of things like your API.

Yeah.

So is your message just kind of like, we're— it's coming basically? Like if, if you're game, we want to play. If you're not, like, stand by, we've got some cool stuff in the works.

Yeah. So that's the high-level message. Yes. There's a lot coming down the pipeline, including if you want to think about it, is it's almost like an app store concept, but there's a lot of prebuilt applications that you can use directly off the shelf without having to build it yourself. But then for the, you know, call it the, the more, you know, AI-centric or technology-interested folks who want to, you know, really do a lot of iconing themselves, all that technology is already there for their imaginations to run wild. And I'm looking at you, Peter Lohmann, and, you know, kind of others in the industry who are very much on that train. And so that is important to us too. And then on top of that, let's say like a prebuilt application or something isn't working with one of our clients. We also have our solutions engineering team where we can really sit with our client, understand their nuanced, specific custom workflows and also tailor the different products to their needs as well. And I think the combination of that is really, really important because we really want to democratize access to this amazing technology to all premium operators, regardless of how large they are, you know, how much resource they're already spending on technology, you know, how AI-forward or how into vibe coding they are. And so we want to make sure all of that is available regardless of where you are. On that barometer.

Sure. Okay, that makes sense. If we switch over to the corporate accounting side for a moment, so all property managers have, of course, their trust account, which we've been talking about, but we also, like any small business, have a corporate bank account. And, you know, right now, like, we use Xero to do our corporate accounting. And it's really— it kind of has all the same problems we just talked about with the trust accounting where it, you know, there's a Plaid interface, but there's very little communication between Xero and my bank. Are there corporate accounting or just general small business accounting apps that are being built on top of Columns APIs that could be exciting for property managers on the corporate accounting side?

Yeah, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, we're connected directly into like QuickBooks Online, things like that too. And so even with the traditional accounting softwares, you can still, by leveraging our APIs and a lot of them, they also have their own, you know, some semblance of APIs. You can still do a lot of automation, you know, off the shelf without any sort of existing. But actually what we're seeing a lot in terms of our financial technology side of the business, we have a ton of these AI-native accounting solutions, you know, that are in the process of integrating and kind of working with us directly to offer that native accounting plus financial operations plus payments. And so essentially you have this like full-on kind of ERP system and like to use a good example, right? Ramp is one of our customers. They've been growing like crazy. They're all over, you know, social media, all of that. They, you know, essentially are the spend management platform for like 55,000. Yeah, we use Ramp across the US.

Yeah.

Right. So they're built on top of our APIs and I think you're also seeing them also expand a lot right now. They have like an open ecosystem where you can also bring your own accounting software. They'll plug in and, you know, sync the GL transactions. But actually they're also pushing up into that ERP layer directly with some of the products that they're launching, like Ramp Sheets. A lot of the AI capabilities are launching. So, you know, you're actually going to see a lot of these other sorts of Office of the CFO type companies expand into a broader ERP play that also includes an accounting software as well. So, you know, don't be surprised if one day you can actually do your corporate accounting, like all on Ramp, for example. Yeah.

Got it. Okay. A lot of property managers are back, you know, back to the trust accounting side for a minute. A lot of property managers are very familiar with the regulations around banking. And so in some states like Ohio, for example, they require a physical presence because of some sort of antiquated state banking laws. Share a little bit about where Column is operating and sort of your thoughts on that.

Yeah. And so in terms of kind of physical kind of locations today, we have California and then we're actually, you know, moving our headquarters to Utah. And so, you know, when it comes to physical locations, it's California and Utah essentially. But we're also in the process of, you know, essentially standing up these physical locations in other states like Ohio, like Oregon, you know, Hawaii, even, you know, where they have these kind of strict physical location requirements in order for, You know, property managers to open up a trust account at the bank. And really what it comes down to, to your point, it's like an antiquated, you know, law or regulation back in the days when money is actually sitting in like a bank vault in state essentially. So then like the state regulators feel like they have a little bit more control when the money is sitting, you know, there in the state, like in a physical vault essentially. The reality is like money today is like in kind of data centers, like at the Federal Reserve level. It's not like in the state physically. And what they care about is, hey, if we are auditing you, will the bank also collaborate? Like if we ask for records, you know, from the bank, like banking records, statements, you know, whether the bank actually properly classified your account as a fiduciary account versus just like a checking account labeled as a trust account. And so that is where like the deep understanding of property management really matters, where if you're working with a property management-specific bank, they know how to work with regulators too when you are going through an audit to provide the documentation. That you need. And on the other side, there's also one thing that's unique about Column in that we are a nationally chartered bank versus a state chartered bank. And so there's this concept of, you know, federal preemption where as a nationally chartered bank under federal law, we bank customers across all 50 states. Essentially the nuance here though, however, is the Department of Real Estate. They don't have jurisdiction over the banks. They have jurisdiction over their licensees, which are the property management companies. So they're essentially saying, hey, you as a property management company, you can't bank with that bank. However, let's just say a lot of those like requirements are being challenged right now, actually in court specifically, especially with the, under the current administration, the bank, the regulator for national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of Currency, or OCC, they're taking a super aggressive stance when it comes to federal preemption. And, you know, even kind of going as far as saying, hey, if you're a state agency, basically regulating like not the bank, but like the underlying kind of company, but that's preventing the company from banking with the bank that they want. I think they're going to have some issues with that. So we'll see how that plays out in court.

Yeah. Send me some news on that. I'd love to report on that and kind of keep my readers up to date with any news along those lines. So seriously, like, for sure, if you see articles or, you know, write-ups about that, I'd love to learn more.

Yeah, definitely.

Okay, cool. We talked, you know, we kind of joked about how like every, every modern business software is basically just a relational database with a GUI on top, which is kind of true.

I remember that combo. And your writings about it.

Yeah, as somebody who's, you know, in the San Francisco area and pretty plugged into, you know, startup culture and tech, I'd love to hear you share your thoughts and vision for where this is all going when you throw in the fact that AI agents can rip through a relational database like it's, you know, a hot knife through butter. In other words, we don't need your GUI— not you, but we don't need the GUI of a software developer to get work done if we have access to the underlying relational database. So what does this mean for the future of apps and business and property managers?

Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why, you know, kind of software as a service for SaaS stocks have traded off, you know, 40 to 60% plus since, you know, basically every time Claude by Anthropic releases some update, there's some sell-off happening in the market, whether it's Google Security or software or something like that. And I think some of it is kind of overblown, overexaggerated. Markets are very reactive, but there is also a lot of truth to it in the sense that if you're just some sort of like GUI, like a workflow kind of like layer on top of like a relational database, like there's really no moat that you have in this agentic AI era. However, I think what's important to think about is having that system of record is still very important. And so the question is, can these system of record companies also build the AI agent execution layer on top of it in a very compelling way. So then you can actually do work. And so I think what's actually going to happen, Peter, is the pricing model, I think, will inevitably change, right? Because right now most software companies, they charge on a per-seat or per-user basis or per-something basis. I think what's going to happen more and more as we push deeper and deeper into this AI era is actually going to be more outcomes-based pricing, right? Instead of like pricing, like, like it's like, it's like tax almost. Like you earn like based on the results that you're delivering. Yeah, right. And so I think that pricing model will shift and the winners are going to be the ones that really capture that. Hey, you are that core system record still, but you're also building some very, very valuable like AI execution layers on top of that. So then you can actually kind of pivot your pricing model to more outcomes-based. And actually in a lot of ways, like the outcomes-based is going to be a more attractive kind of revenue model for companies. And also you're more willing to pay like, let's say a software company is delivering so many results where they're charging some percentage of the profits to the property management company, the incentives are also aligned in that case.

Yeah, I love the aligned incentives there.

Yeah.

My intuition is that a lot of these legacy SaaS companies are going to struggle mightily to build an effective AI agent layer on top of their system of record. I wish them all the best because a lot of these guys at least in our industry, are friends of mine at this point.

Yeah.

And know them to be great people, high integrity, smart, hardworking. And this, this AI tidal wave is just, it's just, it's incredibly destructive, honestly. I mean, it's gonna, it's bringing in a whole new era and it's very exciting as a business owner, but I think it's like all the skills that you needed to survive and thrive and grow before are kind of useless at this point. Everything you figured out with pricing and go-to-market and competitive strategy, it's just like everything's turned on its head. And, and yeah, it will be interesting to see who can weather the storm, so to speak, and really build AI that delivers outcomes for property managers on top of some type of a system of record or existing, you know, tech stack.

Yeah. And it, it is a really, really important point, Peter, right? Because I think it comes back to like innovation, right? Like the companies that are actually investing in R&D and actually building real products with real value, like not just like some minor release that, you know, doesn't really do too much, like they're the ones best positioned to survive this wave and actually even thrive in this wave. But I think when you think about like really legacy software that's been sitting on their hands, like investing in share buybacks versus like actually R&D product development because they've had the sticky base of customers, they're charging per seat or per user or per something, right? Where they just had this like essentially infinite coupon, like that's going to shift a lot. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens. But I think the other thing that's really interesting is like companies that are just adopting AI in general, not just software companies, are actually seeing like much faster revenue growth as a result of this. And there was an interesting article that I saw the other day. The founder of Ramp, Aaron Kleinman, he posted this article about like the— how the ice is breaking, right? There's going to be two camps forming. And he actually pulled real data based on Ramp's kind of customer data that, you know, customers share with Ramp, where it's like customers that are using AI are actually seeing their revenue grow kind of 2 to 3x faster than their peers. And these aren't software companies he's talking about too. He's talking about like a roofing company in Utah, talking about a construction company, like talking about, you know, like a pool maintenance company that are leveraging AI in different workflows and actually seeing their revenue and kind of profits grow even faster. And so I think this is just an interesting callout where it's like, you know, this tidal wave is coming for everybody, including for, you know, a lot of operators and property management as well, where folks, the more they start thinking about it, start leveraging some of these capabilities, that's actually going to also be a competitive advantage moving forward in the future.

Very interesting. Well, we're coming up on the hour. I'd love to hear anything else we should talk about today, George, before we kind of wrap the show.

Honestly, Peter, it's just been a pleasure to kind of be here with you today. Always enjoy the conversations. And if there's anything that I would say is I think everything about AI, AI transformation is very, very exciting, but especially from a banking perspective, The number one thing that I tell my team is no matter how good the technology is, how awesome AI and all the, you know, applications and capabilities it offers, banking at the end of the day also comes down to the relationship, like earning that trust. And part of that, you know, means being there in person with our customers. We still fly out and meet all of our customers regardless of where they are, being part of the conferences. So we're a 2026 NARPM partner, going to be at Broker Owner. Later this month and attending all the local regional events as well too. That is very, very core to banking. And so no matter how good the trust accounting technology and all that gets, I think it's very important to say property management is a relationship business and so is banking. And so that is something we're super, super focused on here, regardless of how crazy good the AI gets or how great the APIs are or anything like that. And so very excited to see everybody on the road, on the conference circuit at these different events and You know, thank you so much for having me here today, Peter, and excited to see you at BrokerOwner as well.

Awesome. Yeah, excited to see you there too, and appreciate you coming on the show. It's been really fun chopping it up and kind of seeing into the future of banking. For folks who are interested in what we've been talking about, kind of want to follow along with you and Columbank, where should they go to do that?

Yeah, so you can check out our website colum.com where you'll see like a lot of our kind of like APIs and like fintech customers are working with us. but you can just check out our kind of property management specific page, columnn.com/property-management. That's got the details on how we serve property managers directly. And lastly, always feel free to reach out to me directly. My email is just George, G-O-R-G-E, at columnn, C-O-L-U-M-N.com. Always happy to chat, always happy to meet up in person and get a coffee. And so again, Peter, appreciate you taking the time today. Always fun chatting with you and can't wait to see what you're vibe coding next.

Awesome. Thanks, George. We appreciate your sponsorship of the 2026 PM Trends Report.

Of course.

And thanks again for coming on the show.

Thank you, Peter.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann and subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, PeterLohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.