There are a bunch of banking-as-a-service middleware providers like Galileo, Treasury Prime, Unit, Synapse etc. who provide nice, easy-to-use APIs for things like opening a bank account, sending an ACH, provisioning a debit card, etc. Doing these things "on your own" can be incredibly difficult, e.g. the NACHA rules around sending and receiving ACH files are incredibly complex. These companies do NOT own a bank charter. Instead, these companies partner with lots of different banks that DO have a bank charter and integrate with their "core banking" systems (core banking systems usually run on mainframes and are provided by companies like Fiserv). Then, fintechs like Chime you want to provide banking services to their clients can focus on the "user facing" part of the experience and less on the difficult, nitty-gritty parts of the banking stack.

What Column has done is consolidate the roles of the middleware provided, core banking system and chartered bank into a single company so there are fewer middlemen to take a cut.

The companies building on top of a BaaS are not banks. They’re fintechs building products like privacy.com, or something else.

Moving money between accounts at the same bank is obviously trivial. I’m talking about the ability to move money to other financial institutions via card payments, wire transfers or whatever.