Evolve Order Fuels Column Growth
Column
This was the moment sponsor bank risk stopped being a background plumbing issue and became a direct distribution tailwind for Column. Mercury had built a customer facing software layer, but the actual accounts, routing numbers, sweeps, and regulated bank operations still sat with partner banks like Evolve. Once Evolve came under a June 11, 2024 consent cease and desist order, Mercury had to move account relationships to safer bank partners, and Column benefited because it could offer both the bank charter and the API stack in one system.
-
Mercury had long operated through sponsor banks behind the scenes. In 2023 it described Evolve as the bank creating customer accounts and running the sweep network, while also saying it wanted multiple bank partners so users could be reassigned quickly if one partner had an issue. That made migration operationally possible once Evolve became a problem.
-
Column is not just another sponsor bank. It owns the charter, ledger, payments rails, compliance stack, and developer API, so a fintech can replace a patchwork of bank plus middleware plus vendors with one provider. That matters during a migration, because every extra vendor means more coordination, slower product changes, and more places for compliance work to break.
-
The payoff was meaningful. By 2024, Column was powering both Mercury and Brex, and revenue reached about $55M, up 126% year over year. In the same market, Lead Bank reached about $180M, which shows a broader shift toward vertically integrated banks as fintechs rebalance away from legacy sponsor banks and middleware heavy setups.
The next phase is a smaller set of fintech infrastructure banks taking a larger share of serious programs. As more fintechs decide that bank stability and integration speed matter as much as pricing, Column is positioned to win more migrations from legacy sponsor banks and turn those emergency switches into long term core banking relationships.