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William Hockey

Executive

Type
Person
Role
Executive
Updated

The profile

Plaid co-founder who moved to an advisory role in June 2019 and later bought a California bank that became Column; Plaid's account-verification service was used in fintech PPP application flows.

Identity and role

William Hockey is the co-founder of Plaid and the founder and CEO of Column N.A., a nationally chartered bank built as infrastructure for fintech developers. He co-founded Plaid with Zach Perret, who is CEO, and served as president and CTO. Today he runs Column, the bank he and his then-wife Annie Robertson Hockey bought in 2021; the two have since divorced, and she remains a board director and shareholder (Upstarts Media profile). He is based in San Francisco.

Biography

Hockey studied computer science and economics at Emory and met Perret as a consultant at Bain & Company in Atlanta. They founded Plaid when Hockey was 21, first in New York, around a consumer personal-finance idea. Frustrated by how hard it was to connect bank accounts, they pivoted to the connectivity infrastructure itself, validating the idea by winning the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon with an app called Rambler. They moved to San Francisco that fall after seed funding from Spark Capital, NEA, and Google Ventures (Contrary Research).

In June 2019 Hockey stepped down from his president and CTO role into an advisory capacity, at a roughly $2.65 billion valuation (TechCrunch); the Wikipedia article lists him as a director (Crunchbase is cited; we do not have a copy).

The company and its PPP role

Plaid sells software that connects consumer apps to banks: account linking, balance and ownership verification, transaction history, and payment-risk signals. It powered Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Cash App.

In Womply's arbitration against Benworth Capital Partners, the corrected final award records Womply's testimony that Fast Lane "connected to bank accounts using Plaid" and lists Plaid among the stack's third-party providers; Womply's account of how it used that data (account ownership, operating status, the February 15, 2020 eligibility date) is from its own filings. Blueacorn also used Plaid, alongside GIACT, Onfido, and IDology, per the December 2022 House Select Subcommittee staff report .

Visa's January 2020 agreement to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion was abandoned in January 2021 after the Justice Department sued to block it in November 2020 (TechCrunch; we do not have a copy of the DOJ release). In April 2021 Plaid raised $425 million at a $13.4 billion valuation (TechCrunch), which Forbes said made its founders billionaires on paper.

Their own relief

No relief located: we found no PPP or EIDL loan to Plaid in a ProPublica search. Column's predecessor bank was acquired in 2021 and relaunched as Column in April 2022 (TechCrunch), after PPP ended.

Plaid settled a consumer-privacy class action, In re Plaid Inc. Privacy Litigation in the Northern District of California, for $58 million, with final approval granted in 2022. The plaintiffs alleged Plaid used consumers' bank login credentials, via apps like Venmo and Coinbase, to harvest and sell more financial data than it needed, and designed login screens that mimicked banks' own interfaces. It was a settlement with injunctive terms (changes to data-collection practices and deletion of certain transaction data), not a liability finding. We located no legal action involving Hockey personally and no enforcement action against Column.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Hockey runs Column, which he positions as a cleaner, vertically integrated alternative to the fragmented banking-as-a-service model: a nationally chartered bank that lets blue-chip fintechs get their rails directly from a regulated bank rather than from layers of middleware. He and Annie paid roughly $50 million in 2021 for Northern California National Bank, a single-branch community bank in Chico, and rebranded it. Column takes no outside venture money (Upstarts Media; we have a copy); customers include Brex and Mercury, with Brex using Column for banking rails and stablecoin payments. Sacra, a research firm, puts Column's 2025 revenue at about $153 million (Sacra's Column page). Plaid was valued at about $8 billion in a February 2026 employee share sale (TechCrunch, Feb. 26, 2026), above its 2025 round but well below the 2021 peak. He is also an active angel investor.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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