- 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