Increase Debuts Bank to Help FinTechs Build Financial Products
Six years after its founding, banking infrastructure company Increase is now a bank.
Increase Bank, announced in a news release Wednesday (July 29), is designed to combine a “modern bank core” with regulated banking services to help companies build financial products with more speed, precision, and control.
“Founded in 2020, Increase’s banking infrastructure and APIs enable companies like Gusto, Ramp and Stripe to move, store, and lend hundreds of billions of dollars,” the company said. “With the addition of Increase Bank, an FDIC-member institution, FinTech companies now have access to a bank engineered for their needs.”
According to the release, the idea for Increase was born from Founder Darragh Buckley’s time at Stripe, where he witnessed the need for banking infrastructure “built with the same engineering depth as the FinTechs relying on it.”
Since then, the FinTech space has become one of tech’s fastest-growing sectors, generating more than $650 billion in revenue in 2025 and growing at around 21% year over year, Increase said in its release, citing data from McKinsey.
Increase said its services now include Increase Bank and a “modern banking core” connected to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House and Visa. The company added that its technology maintains the system of record for account balances and transactions and reconciles to the Federal Reserve in real time.
“A FinTech company’s ability to scale often comes down to whether they have a banking partner that can move at their pace, build solutions to the edge cases they are solving, and give them direct access to payment rails,” said Diede van Lamoen, former head of international at Stripe and advisor. “Increase was built by people who have first-hand experience with these challenges and a drive to support users from the first payment to their billionth.”
In other FinTech news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about new research showing that while traditional banks are still the most widely-used providers of cross-border payments among small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), FinTechs are gaining ground.
According to “The Cross-Border Opportunity,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard collaboration, 36% of internationally active SMBs in the U.S. expect to use FinTechs or payment providers for cross-border purchases in 2026, compared to 30% last year.
“For providers, the takeaway is encouraging: SMBs appear willing to expand relationships with companies that make international payments faster, easier to track and simpler to manage,” PYMNTS wrote.
