Increase Bank Launches to Streamline Fintech Infrastructure and Regulatory Compliance

As reported by PYMNTS, banking infrastructure company Increase has converted six years of API work into a chartered entity — Increase Bank, an FDIC-member institution designed to host fintech deposits, ledger operations, and payment rails under a single regulated roof. The launch is another data point in the consolidation of banking-as-a-service into vertically integrated providers that own both the technology layer and the regulated balance sheet.

The architecture beneath the announcement

Increase, founded in 2020 by former Stripe operator Darragh Buckley, built its commercial reputation supplying banking APIs to fintechs including Gusto, Ramp, and Stripe — reportedly moving, storing, and lending hundreds of billions of dollars through that infrastructure. Increase Bank now pairs those APIs with what the company describes as a modern banking core connected directly to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, and Visa. The system is positioned as the system of record for account balances and transactions, with reconciliation to the Federal Reserve occurring in real time.

The structural shift is direct. The bank no longer rents rails from sponsor institutions. It owns them. For fintech clients, that removes a layer of intermediary risk and the recurring operational friction of sponsor-bank substitution.

What the charter actually changes

The critical variable is not the product surface but the regulatory perimeter. As an FDIC-member institution, Increase Bank assumes direct exposure to deposit-insurance assessment, supervisory examination, and capital requirements that third-party banking partners historically absorbed on behalf of their fintech tenants. Liability for compliance, AML controls, and recovery-and-resolution planning — previously dispersed across multiple sponsor banks — now concentrates inside a single legal entity.

Advisor Diede van Lamoen, former head of international at Stripe, framed the value proposition around scale: a banking partner capable of moving at product velocity rather than quarterly release cycles. The operational question left unanswered is whether internal compliance infrastructure can match that cadence without producing the kind of control failures that have triggered consent orders against embedded-finance providers in recent years.

Macro signal and the hidden liability

Increase cited McKinsey data placing fintech revenue above $650 billion in 2025, with year-over-year growth near 21%. Complementary PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard research indicates that 36% of internationally active U.S. SMBs expect to use fintechs or payment providers for cross-border purchases in 2026, up from 30% the prior year.

Vertical integration reduces cost and latency. It also concentrates risk. When the bank, the core, and the API gateway sit inside a single charter holder, a control failure in one domain propagates across the other two without the circuit-breakers that a multi-sponsor architecture provided by accident. For fintech clients evaluating Increase Bank, the diligence checklist has shifted: the relevant question is no longer whether the rails are fast, but whether the charter holder can sustain examination-grade controls as transaction volume scales.