Increase, the banking infrastructure firm behind Gusto and Stripe's payments, received an FDIC charter and launched Increase Bank, targeting faster product building for FinTechs.
Alpha Score of 74 reflects strong overall profile with strong momentum, moderate value, strong quality, strong sentiment.
Increase, the banking infrastructure company that has quietly supported payments for Gusto, Ramp and Stripe, is now a bank itself. The firm received an FDIC charter and launched Increase Bank on Wednesday, combining a modern core banking system with direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails and The Clearing House.
Founded in 2020 by Darragh Buckley after his stint at Stripe, Increase had already built APIs that move, store and lend hundreds of billions of dollars. Buckley said he saw firsthand that FinTech companies needed infrastructure built with the same engineering depth they apply to their own products. The new bank structure lets those clients build financial products faster, with direct settlement and real-time reconciliation to the Fed.
“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 Diede van Lamoen, former head of international at Stripe and an advisor to Increase.
The FinTech sector generated more than $650 billion in revenue last year and is growing at roughly 21% annually, Increase said, citing McKinsey data. That growth is pulling more non-bank providers into regulated territory. Separate research from a PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard collaboration found that 36% of internationally active U.S. small and midsize businesses expect to use FinTechs for cross-border payments in 2026, up from 30% this year.
Mastercard, which partners with FinTechs on payment infrastructure, holds an Alpha Score of 70 out of 100 on AlphaScala, reflecting steady positioning in the financials sector as digital payments expand.
Increase Bank maintains the system of record for account balances and transactions and reconciles with the Federal Reserve in real time, the company said. That gives clients a single regulated entity for both the core ledger and the payment rails, rather than layering a bank on top of a separate technology vendor.
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