Finovate Blog

• Increase has launched Increase Bank, combining an FDIC-member institution with its API-first banking core and direct connections to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, and Visa.
• The company entered banking through its 2025 acquisition of Washington-based Twin City Bank, which continues serving existing community customers under the Twin City Bank name.
• By operating its own bank while continuing to work with partner banks, Increase is integrating more of the embedded-finance stack and gaining greater control over product development, compliance, payments, and economics.

API-first banking fintech Increase is launching Increase Bank to bring its modern bank core to help businesses build and launch financial products.

With today’s launch, Increase now includes Increase Bank, an FDIC-member institution, plus its built-from-scratch banking core with direct connections to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, and Visa.

“This is a bank built by a team of product-obsessed operators for ambitious companies that are just as obsessed with building the best possible products for their customers,” said Increase Founder Darragh Buckley. “It is programmable at scale and designed for reliability, speed, and flexibility.”

Rather than pursuing a new bank charter from scratch, Increase acquired Washington-based Twin City Bank in 2025, giving it a regulated banking institution to complement its API-first infrastructure platform. The single-branch bank now operates as Increase Bank while continuing to serve Twin City Bank’s existing community banking customers under the Twin City name.

While the bank expands Increase’s role in the financial stack, the technology remains central to its strategy. Instead of serving exclusively as middleware between fintechs and sponsor banks, the company is integrating more of the stack by operating its own bank while continuing to partner with others. The move gives Increase greater control over product development, compliance, and payment operations, while positioning it to capture a larger share of the economics behind embedded finance.

“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 Stripe Head of International Diede van Lamoen. “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.”

Founded in 2020, Increase provides the banking infrastructure behind companies including Gusto, Ramp, and Stripe. Its API-first platform enables developers to build products for money movement, deposit accounts, and card issuing using programmable banking components.

Photo from Mike Hindle on Unsplash

• Ramp has officially launched in Canada, marking the spend management platform’s first expansion outside the US and bringing its corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, and accounting tools to Canadian businesses.
• The Canadian platform includes localized features such as CAD and USD spending without FX markup, automatic GST/HST/PST/QST tax coding, Canadian-dollar accounting integrations, and cards issued through Peoples Trust.
• Ramp’s expansion comes as competition in business banking intensifies, following Expensify’s UK and EU corporate card launch and Intuit’s introduction of a QuickBooks-connected corporate credit card.

Corporate card and expense management platform Ramp is moving across international borders this week. The New York-based company is now available to businesses in Canada.

Today’s launch comes after Ramp piloted its Canadian operations with a select few Canada-based small businesses. With the broad launch, businesses headquartered in Canada can now use Ramp’s capabilities for managing spend, paying bills, and closing their books. Notably, Ramp is still not available to businesses based in Quebec or Saskatchewan.

Ramp’s new Canadian operation is built for Canadian businesses, allowing businesses to spend in CAD and USD without additional FX markup. Additionally, the platform is designed to accommodate Canada’s tax system by automatically coding transactions with the appropriate GST, HST, PST, or QST, helping finance teams streamline expense management and tax compliance.

The Canadian offering brings the same capabilities as the US platform, including corporate cards, expense management, reimbursements, bill pay, and accounting sync. However, Canadian businesses make payments in CAD and cards are issued through Peoples Trust. Card transactions sync natively with QuickBooks Online, Xero, Microsoft Business Central, NetSuite, and Sage Intacct in Canadian dollars.

To support its Canadian expansion, Ramp will open its first office in Toronto, where it will build a local team to provide sales, implementation, and customer support for Canadian businesses. The local presence underscores Ramp’s longer-term investment in the Canadian market as it expands beyond the US.

Ramp, which is used by over 70,000 businesses, was founded in 2019 and has experienced notable growth, most recently fueled by a $300 million financing round that valued it at $32 billion. The company powers over $100 billion in purchases annually. Interestingly, Ramp’s launch into Canada comes before the company’s expansion into the UK and EU, which Ramp announced would happen “this summer” after its March acquisition of Billhop, a Stockholm- and London-based payments platform.

Today’s announcement comes at a time when competition in business banking is heating up. Just last week, Expensify launched its corporate card across the UK and EU, while five days ago, Intuit launched its own corporate credit card that will be connected to QuickBooks. Together, the moves underscore how providers are racing to expand both geographically and across the business finance stack, giving small and midsize businesses more integrated options for managing spending, payments, and accounting.

Photo by Cedric Fauntleroy

• Cross River Bank will provide the regulated banking infrastructure behind X Money, X’s new embedded financial services offering.
• X Money will bring FDIC-insured, interest-bearing accounts, a Visa debit card, and peer-to-peer payment capabilities directly into the social media platform.
• The launch advances Elon Musk’s “everything app” vision and will test whether US consumers are willing to use a social platform as a primary financial interface.

Cross River Bank, a bank and banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, announced today that it will power X Money, the financial services capability in X (formerly Twitter).

Through the partnership, X will embed FDIC-insured, interest-bearing accounts, a Visa debit card, and broader payment capabilities directly into its social media platform. Cross River will power the financial capabilities through its regulated infrastructure and access to payment rails.

“With Cross River providing the banking backbone and X connecting users across the United States, the collaboration represents a new standard for money movement, combining compliance, speed, and scale in a way that meets the needs of today’s digital-first consumers,” the company said in a statement. “By enabling seamless, in-app finance, this will unlock a future where financial services live within the platforms that consumers already use every day.”

Founded in 2008, Cross River offers scalable, embedded payments, cards, lending, and crypto solutions to businesses and consumers. The bank is known for its API-driven banking core and regulatory expertise. Because it owns its infrastructure, Cross River eliminates the risk and compliance gaps that come with bringing on third-party systems.

X selected Cross River because of its ability to handle payments quickly and at scale, enabling it to support new financial products and features.

This follows years of promises from X owner Elon Musk to turn X into “the everything app.” Adding embedded accounts, debit cards, and peer-to-peer payments moves that ambition beyond social media content and into financial services. It also gives X a way to deepen engagement by allowing users to store, spend, and transfer money without leaving the platform.

The launch of X Money will be a good test of whether US consumers are ready to treat a social media app as a primary financial interface. If it is successful and its users willingly adopt it as a payments platform, X will have access to valuable transaction data and can create new opportunities around commerce, creator payouts, subscriptions, and other financial products such as lending. It would also put the platform in more direct competition with digital wallets and challenger banks. Cross River’s role is critical because it gives X the regulated banking and payments infrastructure needed to pursue that vision without becoming a bank itself.

Photo by SHVETS production

• The OCC conditionally approved Upstart to establish a branchless, full-service national bank just four months after the company applied.
• The charter would let Upstart originate loans nationwide, accept FDIC-insured deposits, and reduce its reliance on third-party banking partners while preserving its existing loan-purchaser network.
• The approval reflects growing fintech interest in bank charters, but the OCC’s rejection of Wise’s application shows that regulatory approval is still far from guaranteed.

Lending marketplace Upstart has been granted conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish Upstart Bank. The news comes four months after Upstart submitted its initial application.

Upstart is pursuing a de novo bank charter—a license to establish a newly formed, full-service national bank—and will accept the accompanying bank holding company oversight. The charter will allow Upstart to reduce operational complexity as well as reliance on third party partners.

“Conditional approval from the OCC is an important milestone for Upstart Bank and we will continue to work with the OCC, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve on the remaining steps,” said Upstart Co-Founder and CEO Paul Gu. “Upstart Bank will allow us to lower the cost of lending and bring our full product offering to all 50 states, advancing our mission to radically reduce the cost and complexity of credit for all Americans.”

While the newly formed bank will be headquartered in Delaware, it will not have any physical branches. The new charter will allow it to originate loans to all US consumers and accept FDIC insured deposits. Upstart emphasized that the new bank is intended to complement its existing funding model instead of replace it. Banks, credit unions, and institutional investors are expected to continue purchasing the vast majority of loans originated on the Upstart platform.

California-based Upstart was founded in 2012 and leverages AI to price credit and automate the borrowing process. The company closed its IPO in 2020 and is currently traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker UPST with a market capitalization of $2.67 billion.

Upstart’s conditional approval comes as bank charter activity is accelerating under a more fintech-friendly regulatory environment. At the same time, regulators are demonstrating that approvals are far from automatic. Just one day after Upstart’s announcement, the OCC rejected Wise’s application for a national trust bank charter, underscoring that applicants must still satisfy supervisory and compliance expectations.

Photo by Erik Mclean