Why We Bought a Bank
Increase moves a little over half a trillion dollars a year with about 33 employees. Darragh Buckley, Stripe's first employee, bought a bank so he could expose every bank function by API.
· 8 min read
Darragh Buckley, founder and CEO of Increase and Stripe's first employee, interviewed by Turner Novak (The Peel)
Darragh Buckley is the founder and CEO of Increase, a company that exposes US banking functions such as accounts, ACH, wires, cards and real-time payments through an API. He grew up in Limerick, Ireland, worked at Lehman Brothers, and in 2010 became the first employee at Stripe, where he worked with the Collison brothers on the early banking and card network integrations. Increase started in 2020, and about a year ago it bought Twin City Bank in Washington state, which was renamed Increase Bank last month. It processes a little over half a trillion dollars in payment volume with about 33 employees, and customers include parts of Gusto and Ramp.
Summary
Darragh Buckley says Stripe always felt like an awkward duck on other banks' systems, so he built Increase to expose every field of the Federal Reserve and card networks by API, then bought a bank to own the last layer. His product principle is high-fidelity pass-through, where Increase uses the network's own parameter names instead of inventing abstractions. He builds compliance into the code and runs examinations on himself many times a day so audits become routine. His lessons from early Stripe are that a small empowered team can do a six-week certification in 18 hours, that urgency is cultural, and that early payments companies should read every transaction before building fraud systems. These signals are from an interview that Turner Novak did with Darragh Buckley on The Peel.
