After acquiring a small Longview, Washington lender, a former Stripe employee has added bank charter capabilities to his fintech Increase, aiming to be a “regulated banking partner” for fellow fintech clients.
Increase founder Darragh Buckley acquired Twin City Bancorp, the holding company for Twin City Bank, about one year ago and rebranded it as Increase Bank after receiving regulatory approval for the name and business plan changes. Buckley declined to share a purchase price.
Increase, which handles money movement and storage and card issuing for firms such as payroll service providers, neobanks, loan servicing and payment companies, launched its bank identity Wednesday.
The move was a long time coming and not necessarily influenced by the bank regulatory environment, Buckley said, noting he started the company six years ago with the goal of marrying a bank and technology company.
Buckley called Increase a lender “for ambitious technology companies,” and the bank launch is geared more toward winning new business over expanding existing business.
“For years, I needed a bank with good product sense,” he wrote in a Wednesday LinkedIn post. “One that grasped the possibilities of software and couldn’t stand to see them stifled. Increase Bank is the bank I needed at Stripe.”
Buckley spent six years at Stripe before founding Increase in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. Increase works with Stripe and fintechs Ramp and Gusto, which use Increase’s technology to process some $500 billion annually, Buckley wrote.
Increase offers a modern banking core with direct connections to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, and Visa. The fintech’s technology holds the system of record for account balances and transactions and reconciles to the Fed in real time, allowing fintechs to control accounts and interact with their bank more quickly, according to a news release.
“Being able to work more closely with a bank, especially with a bank that's culturally similar to us, and therefore has a lot of product-centricity, to enable our users to have reliable, transparent, flexible services is great,” Buckley said Thursday.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco approved Buckley’s acquisition of 100% of the voting shares of Twin City Bancorp in June 2025. Single-branch Twin City had about $114.6 million in assets as of March 31.
“I’ve been making bank investments for a few years now. Twin City Bank is a tidy, profitable bank that happens to be relatively close to me,” Buckley said.
Jon Jones is president and CEO of Increase Bank. Jones was CEO of Washington Business Bank, which was bought by Sound Credit Union in January 2025. Jones has also been a board member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines for about six years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Increase also works with Grasshopper Bank, Indiana-based First Internet Bank and Core Bank, and those partnerships remain important, Buckley said.
“We have many users who fundamentally need to be multi-bank, either for operational reasons or even their own corporate governance reasons,” he said. “A lot of times, the financial services that get provided through us are crucial to the business.”
