Column economics driven by Mercury

This shows Column is less a software vendor than a leveraged toll collector on startup banking growth. When Mercury adds deposits, card spend, wires, and treasury balances, Column gets paid through deposit spread, interchange share, and per transaction fees without funding Mercury's customer acquisition. That is why a few large fintech logos matter more than a long tail of smaller programs, and why Mercury's growth can move Column's revenue disproportionately fast.

• Mercury is a deposit heavy fintech. At $500M annualized revenue in 2024, most of its revenue came from interest sharing on roughly $20B of deposits, with smaller contributions from interchange and SaaS. A bank partner tied into that flow benefits every time balances and payment activity rise.
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• Column's model is structurally tighter than middleware BaaS. It owns the charter, ledger, payments rails, and compliance stack, so Mercury can open accounts and move money through one bank stack instead of stitching together sponsor bank, processor, and middleware. That makes migrations easier and gives Column more of the economics.
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• The closest comparison is Lead Bank, but the customer mix is different. Lead is anchored by lending programs like Affirm and gets most revenue from interest, while Column is anchored by neobanks like Mercury and Brex and has a more balanced mix of deposit spread, interchange, and API fees. The underlying fintech determines the bank's revenue shape.
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Going forward, the prize for Column is to become the default bank layer for a small number of scaled fintechs that keep compounding deposits and payment volume. If Mercury keeps expanding treasury, cards, and startup banking share, Column can grow alongside it into a much larger infrastructure bank without chasing risky edge cases.