Column Rebuilds Financial Infrastructure with Full-Stack Card Issuing and Stablecoin Integration

Column has launched a suite of four infrastructure products—stablecoin interoperability, full-stack card issuing, global banking, and multicurrency accounts—designed to replace the fragmented "middleman" model of fintech. For professionals, this represents a significant consolidation of the tech stack, allowing firms to bypass third-party orchestrators and processors by working directly with a single, vertically integrated bank.

What was announced

Column is introducing four distinct products aimed at streamlining complex financial flows. The first is a stablecoin offering that makes USDC and USDT natively interoperable with the U.S. dollar and international payment rails 24/7, without using intermediaries. Second, the company has launched a full-stack card issuing platform. Having previously sponsored card programs, Column has now built its own issuer processor from the ground up. This allows clients to manage banking, processing, and capital through a single integration for Mastercard and Visa programs across debit, credit, and stablecoin-backed manifestations.

The third product, Global Banking, enables firms to issue U.S. dollar or local currency accounts and cards to verified customers worldwide, utilizing the same compliance tooling used for domestic operations. Finally, Column is offering multicurrency accounts and local payouts. This allows users to receive, hold, and send foreign currencies in individually numbered accounts with instant conversion to USD and connections to international systems like SEPA Instant.

These tools are already being utilized at scale by major fintech players including Ramp, Brex, Bilt, Mercury, Slash, and Kapital. The integration allows for complex transactions, such as receiving USDC from Mongolia and instantly splitting the funds between a domestic bank via FedNow and a European recipient via SWIFT, to be executed through a few API calls in a matter of seconds.

"We started Column with the insane idea to rebuild every component of the financial system from scratch, to enable any technology company to build and operate at the frontier. I think we have finally completed that build."

A representative at Column.

The companies involved

Column occupies a unique position in the fintech ecosystem as a nationally chartered bank that builds its own core technology. Unlike traditional banks that rely on legacy software providers or "middleware" platforms to connect with fintechs, Column operates as a developer-first infrastructure provider. This vertical integration is intended to eliminate the friction typically found when stitching together disparate vendors for ledgering, payments, and regulated banking services.

The company has become a primary infrastructure partner for some of the most high-profile names in the sector. Its client roster includes spend management giants like Ramp and Brex, as well as Mercury, which focuses on banking for startups. By controlling the entire stack—from the balance sheet to the API—Column competes both with traditional sponsor banks and with pure-play technology orchestrators. The firm’s approach reflects a broader trend in the industry toward "full-stack" banking, where the distinction between the financial institution and the software provider is blurred to provide higher performance and lower latency for global fund flows.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has previously tracked Column’s expanding influence through its strategic partnerships across the lending and spend management sectors. In July 2026, we reported on how Oportun and Column Partner to Expand Access to Responsible Unsecured Personal Loans, highlighting the bank's role in scaling credit products. Column’s infrastructure also underpins major moves in the corporate treasury space; for instance, Mercury Launches AI-Native Spend Management with Agent Cards and Intelligent Budgets utilized Column’s capabilities to power advanced card features. Additionally, the bank’s role in the broader fintech ecosystem was evident in the news that Apartment List and Flex Partner to Embed Flexible Rent Payments Directly into Property Search, and the $180M funding round where Augustus Secures $180M Series B to Revolutionize Global Dollar Access for International Fintechs, further illustrating the demand for the global dollar access Column is now formalizing.

What this means

This move signals a direct challenge to the "BaaS 1.0" model, which relied on layers of middleware to bridge the gap between software companies and legacy banks. By bringing issuer processing and stablecoin settlement in-house, Column is putting immense pressure on standalone processors and orchestration layers that do not hold their own charters. The industry is moving toward a reality where "instant" is the baseline, and the ability to move value across borders and asset classes without settlement delays is becoming a competitive necessity. The open question for the sector is whether traditional banks can modernize fast enough to prevent a total migration of high-volume fintech traffic to these vertically integrated challengers.