Darragh Buckley, CEO of Increase, on building the next generation of banking infrastructure

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Dec 26, 2025

Darragh Buckley, CEO and co-founder of Increase, previously a key player at Stripe, dives into his journey of revolutionizing banking infrastructure. He shares insights from his time at Stripe, emphasizing the need to streamline tech and business complexities. The conversation highlights Increase's innovative direct connection to the Federal Reserve, its API-first approach, and impactful real-time payments stories. Darragh also discusses his vision for specialized community banks and the importance of embedding compliance into engineering.

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INSIGHT

Decouple Business From Engineering

Decouple business and engineering by dropping down a layer to shared infrastructure.
Increase applies this by connecting to the Federal Reserve rather than bank-by-bank to simplify integrations.

ANECDOTE

Email-Based Wire Failures At Stripe

Stripe avoided programmatic wires because failure notifications arrived as emails, which was brittle.
That experience drove Increase to build an API-first core tailored for machines and high-volume flows.

INSIGHT

Build Exception Handling Into The Core

An API-first side core must handle high-volume happy-paths and exceptions programmatically.
Building exception handling early improves product, monitoring, and regulatory compliance.

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Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase. If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all at once, you need to drop down a layer. That insight led to Increase, which does something quite novel, instead of connecting to banks one by one, they connect directly to the Federal Reserve itself, operating their own banking core that exposes all this functionality through APIs. With a team of less than 20 people, they're now processing over $100 billion annually.

In this conversation, we dig into the lessons Darragh learned scaling Stripe, why he believes compliance and accounting should be built into engineering from day one rather than bolted on later, his vision for a future where community banks serve specific communities like dentists or families managing elderly parents' finances, and why he's personally investing in community banks across the Pacific Northwest. We also get into real-time payments infrastructure, including a great story about buying a car on a Saturday. Now let's get on with the show.

In the podcast, you will learn:

How Increase was born out of early challenges at Stripe.
What he learned about scaling fintech companies at Stripe.
The advantage of dropping down a layer when building fintech infrastructure.
How Increase is able to connect directly to the Federal Reserve.
The concept of a side core and how it integrates with banking cores.
The different types of companies they work with.
A fun story about paying a car dealer with a real time payment on a Saturday.
The scale that Increase is at today.
Why they decided that now is the time to spread with word about Increase.
Why it matters to build compliance into your product very early.
What lessons compliance can learn from software engineering.
How they are managing real time risk.
Why Darragh has personally invested in several community banks.
What will have changed in financial services if Increase is successful.

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