I'm excited to share today's conversation, because it pulls a thread I've been tugging at on this show for years: how do we actually make compliance fast, accurate, and less expensive, and what does a fintech-native bank look like under the hood? My guest is Meredith Turner, General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer of Column N.A., a bank that powers some of the most prominent fintechs in the US — companies like Mercury and Brex.
Meredith has one of those eclectic resumes I'm always urging young people to build. She started in litigation at Wachtell, Lipton; spent eleven years at JPMorgan in three very different roles (including General Counsel of the technology organization); and is now one of the senior leaders building Column. She told me Wachtell — a famous old school New York law firm — was actually the most "fintech-like" place she'd ever worked: lean teams, no swim lanes, do-whatever-it-takes. That cross-pollination shows up everywhere in her thinking.
Column itself is a fascinating experiment. Co-founder William Hockey (you'll also know him as cofounder of Plaid) acquired a small bank in 2021, stripped out the legacy tech, and rebuilt the institution from the perspective of a developer who wants to build financial products. The thesis is "clean stack, clear accountability" — no chains of vendors, no game of telephone, just the bank and its fintech partner working side by side. Long-time listeners will hear echoes here of conversations we've had about the Synapse collapse, which Meredith addresses directly: partner banking didn't fail in '22 and '23, she argues — what failed were institutions that tried to do it without really understanding the model.
The theme I most want to flag, though, is Meredith's framing of compliance. She's emphatic that compliance built into the tech stack from day one is an enabler, not a brake. Column's model is that the same API that moves money is the same data feed that monitors risk – in real time. Listeners will hear a parallel in an upcoming episode with the U.K.’s FCA innovation team: what Colin Payne describes as "policy as code" at the regulator level, Meredith is describing as a working reality inside a bank. This is the future, folks – for both.
The most provocative moment for me came when I asked Meredith what regulators should be doing. She flipped the question. The common refrain is that regulators need better technology to keep up with banks; her counter is that banks need better technology so regulators can have the visibility they need. Imagine, she said, an exam process that looked more like the way Column oversees its fintech partners — real-time data feeds, self-serve analytics, far less ferrying of PDFs back and forth. It's a clean inversion of the usual narrative, and it has stuck with me.
We also touch on AI in financial services (her core point is that AI is only as good as the data underneath it). We talk about the future of community banking. And we explore where the line should sit between "platform bank" and a truly engaged partner.
A few AIR updates. Please check out our recently published progress report on AIR’s work, and our newly published playbook for stablecoin policy in Africa. There’s also information on some of our recent events, including a TechSprint on Fairness by Design with Consumer Reports.
We also want to share information about our PROTECT initiative, undertaken with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Center for Financial Inclusion, combating financial scams in Latin America. The latter is part of our larger campaign against financial crimes, which we are expanding – much more to come on that.
We’ve also recently had our team at the 3i Africa conference in Ghana, and Shelley Anderson spoke at Stablecon Europe on stablecoins in Africa.
In the fall, both Nat Weber and I will speak at Money 2020 USA in Las Vegas, NV.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it with colleagues who care about financial services and, by extension, financial regulation.
More on Meredith Turner
Meredith Turner is the General Counsel & Chief Risk Officer of Column National Association, an OCC-regulated national bank headquartered in San Francisco, where she leads the Legal, Compliance, Risk & Regulatory Affairs functions. Prior to joining Column in 2022, Meredith spent over a decade in senior roles in the Legal Department at JPMorgan Chase. At JPMorgan, Meredith served as the General Counsel for the Bank’s Global Technology organization, where she was responsible for advising the Bank on legal and regulatory matters related to technology, IP, data privacy, cybersecurity, cloud, and third-party risk. Earlier in her career at JPMorgan, Meredith led the global financial crimes legal team, and managed complex regulatory investigations within the Bank’s Government Investigations group.
Prior to JPMorgan, Meredith practiced at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York, where she focused on regulatory and enforcement matters and complex commercial litigation. Meredith began her legal career in the federal judiciary, first as a District Court clerk in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and subsequently in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her law degree from Duke University School of Law.
