Partner Diligence

About Column For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors.

All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve.

At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us!

The Partner Diligence team leverages deep regulatory compliance expertise to manage the diligence, risk assessment, control review, approval, and onboarding of Column’s fintech partners. The regulatory landscape for fintech-banking partnerships is evolving daily, and Column is committed to exceeding regulatory expectations when it comes to partner onboarding. As such, we’re looking for someone who not only has a deep command of federal and state financial regulations, but also understands how to identify, assess, and mitigate the compliance risks posed by both consumer and commercial partnerships.

Implementation of a best-in-class Third-Party Risk Management program is critical to the success of Column’s business model and growth of its partnership business, and the individual in this Partner Diligence role will have an opportunity to meaningfully influence the Bank’s strategic direction, growth, safety & soundness, and success.

This position will report to the Bank’s General Counsel, our Chief Risk Officer. There is a strong preference for this role to be in-person in our Presidio-based office in San Francisco, however we may consider remote candidates with frequent travel to San Francisco.

• Partner closely with the business, finance, other risk leads, legal, compliance, and regulatory affairs in the ongoing execution of the Third-Party Risk Management Framework
• End-to-end ownership for the risk management of third-party partner onboarding, including risk identification, due diligence, risk assessment, and control review
• Extensive diligence and review of a prospective partner’s policies, procedures, customer agreements, TOS, audit reports, marketing materials, and disclosures. The diligence process will include working closely with clients’/partners’ compliance teams to understand, evaluate, assess, and document their internal compliance controls
• Advise on applicable compliance risks and related severity, appropriate internal controls, risk and issue identification, root cause analysis and remediation, and risk reporting and escalation
• Develop corrective actions, where required, to ensure timely remediation by prospective partners of any open issues before launch
• Develop compliance requirements and ongoing monitoring and reporting standards for Column’s oversight of each partner once live
• Assess third-party risks in the context of the applicable risk appetite and related limits and thresholds
• Play a key role in an effective governance program, including appropriate Third-Party Risk related committees, policies, procedures, and reporting

• 10+ years of regulatory compliance experience in regulated financial services, including experience evaluating compliance programs
• Familiarity with the fintech-banking partnership model, and key risks and risk mitigation strategies relevant to the partnership model
• Willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the legwork one day, and set strategy the next. You are scrappy, strategic, humble, and have a deep level of subject‑matter expertise and intellectual…