PMs Are Fintech: How Column is Rethinking Property Management Banking

Most of the AI conversation in property management has been stuck on the front office. Leasing. Maintenance. CRM. Better ways to talk to owners and tenants. Meanwhile the back office, where trust accounting and money movement actually live, has been treated like a black box you can't get data out of without downloading PDFs and eyeballing transactions side by side.

I brought George Cheng from Column on to talk about what changes when your bank is also a technology company. Column took a different path than everyone else: instead of renting core banking software from FIS, Fiserv, or Jack Henry like every other bank does, they built the whole stack themselves, down to a direct connection to the Federal Reserve. That's the same infrastructure powering Brex, Mercury, Ramp, and Bilt. Now they've pointed it at property managers, who George makes a strong case are financial technology companies whether they realize it or not.

We got into the practical stuff. Automating bank reconciliations in an agentic way. Owner distributions that hit instantly instead of disappearing into the ether for five days. Permission-scoped API keys that let you approve money movement with a passkey before a dollar leaves the account, so an agent can't blow your foot off. We also went deep on the parts nobody explains clearly: how ACH clawbacks and the 60-day tenant dispute window actually work, why trust accounts can't be frozen or set off against liens, and what the Colorado-style "physical branch" requirement is really trying to accomplish.

Then we argued about the future. Where the owner fits in the shared-economy model, whether AI efficiency in accounting eventually cannibalizes the value a PM sells, and why George thinks you can vibe-code a workflow but you can't vibe-code financial services. If you want to understand where the money layer of this industry is heading, this one's worth your time.

00:00 Intro
00:43 What Column is: banking 2.0 for fiduciaries
02:23 Why property managers are fintech companies in disguise
04:18 Tech vs. banking: the 20-year relationship nobody wants to leave
07:34 Front office got the AI. The back office got ignored
08:19 Automating bank recs the agentic way
10:19 Why the harness and the API keys beat the model
12:18 Moving money with an agent: the expensive "oops" problem
15:11 Jevons Paradox and the ephemeral API key
16:49 Supreme command of your own data as the real baseline
19:16 When API access becomes table stakes
20:19 Where owners and tenants actually feel the upside
21:49 Real-time payments and request-for-payment rent collection
24:15 Six Fed settlement windows and same-day ACH
27:09 Processing $4.5T and the fifth-largest by volume
31:30 Why Column opens physical branches anyway
33:00 How ACH clawbacks and return windows really work
35:25 Are disputes a foregone conclusion? What actually happens
40:19 The PM Trends report: appetite for fintech and rent guarantees
43:01 Does too much accounting efficiency hurt the PM?
51:11 Banking as a trust-based relationship first
52:30 Solutions engineers and the built-in app store
53:40 Column is a good bank even if you never touch the API
54:53 Vertical software under pressure: the unwinding of closed systems
58:35 Why you can't vibe-code financial services
01:00:23 AppFolio's real revenue: value-added services, not SaaS
01:04:00 The owner benefits package nobody's built yet
01:05:51 Where to find George and Column