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Comment by darraghbuckley | Hacker News Reader

Thanks @op! Increase employee here:

We're early days and not quite ready for open sign-ups yet (sorry, known bug). We'll be more public over the coming weeks and months.

We're banking for developers; you can programatically create accounts, cards, and move money.

Our users are primarily financial technology companies.

We're a small team from Stripe, Robinhood, and Visa building the bank we always wanted. If this sounds interesting to you we're hiring: jobs@increase.com

If I can be helpful, I'm at darragh@increase.com.

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heya! i'm casually interested in the space, and also have been tracking Column (https://column.com/)

to a distant observer, you look similar, but i'm sure there are real differences between you, so I'd love something like a "top 3 things to note" about Increase vs Column, in a least-getting-you-in-trouble way as possible - its hard to compare because i dont know what I don't know.

For one, Column is a bank.

This is super important – if you are a chartered/regulated bank that's functioning currently then whatever you claim has merit. Otherwise it is just another software project that's going to struggle to get adoption because they won't have thought through all the regulatory and compliance issues.

And can easily violate myriads of laws that can quickly land you long prison sentences.

Yes! We're obviously not the first to see the need!

I think there are many engineers who are frustrated knowing the data and capabilities that exist in banking that aren't exposed programmatically.

There are at least four (and I'm undoubtedly missing many!) interesting companies aiming to combine technology and a bank charter:

- Luna[0].

- M1 Finance[1].

- Column[2].

- Increase[3].

Building a bank involves reading, understanding, and respecting regulation. It invovles integrating with large financial networks. It involves rallying a team for a years-long adventure. Each of these is early days and it'll be a few years before any of us understands how this super large and important problem will be solved.

0. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/former-square-exec-leads...

1. https://m1.com/blog/bank-and-board

2. https://column.com/

3. https://increase.com/

If Increase has a bank charter why does the site say "Bank accounts and banking services are provided by Increase’s partner banks"?

Teller (https://teller.io/) is another one I noticed a few years ago. Seems very similar.

No, Teller is more of a competitor to Plaid (https://plaid.com/). Plaid offers an API to perform a variety of actions with existing banks, and charges through the wazoo for it as a middleware.

Column is an actual bank, and offers exhaustive developer-first APIs. I suspect you can do a lot of things with them you cannot do with Plaid, and at highly reduced cost comparatively. Increase doesn't seem to be a bank but is a much lower-level API than Plaid and allows things like opening accounts, FWICT.

BTW, bunq (https://www.bunq.com/) is a cool nl-based bank which offers an incredibly in-depth API. But I would not call it dev-centric, the DX is awful.

Sorry, yes, I was trying to say Teller is similar to Increase, not Column.

> Our users are primarily financial technology companies.

As a developer, I'd love to have some more information about the typical problems that inspired Increase's value proposition. If I was meeting with a financial tech CEO tomorrow, should I assume that they probably have these problems or need this service? Are there resources that I could peruse to learn more about these common problems?

Our users are financial technology companies. They build things like payroll, loan servicing, business payments, consumer payments, investment platforms, and neo-banks.

When we built Stripe, one of the largest points of friction was getting a banking partner. It took months and only after signing were we even able to start assessing the technology. There are so many potential companies that simply don't make it past the partnership step. We want to fix that.

The US needs a bank (holding a bank charter) that's also a technology company. Increase certainly isn't there yet (patches welcome: jobs@increase.com) but we already have integrations with the Federal Reserve, Visa, and The Clearing House. Our API already serves businesses you know and love.

> The US needs a bank (holding a bank charter) that's also a technology company.

Do you have plans on becoming a bank and getting a bank charter then? I've worked with several payment processors and BaaS providers that are most definitely not on that path. (CTO at neo bank).

Do you really have an integration with the Federal Reserve and the Clearing House or do you have an integration to a bank that has it? Last time I checked at least one of them required participants to be a chartered financial institution.

Could a solo dev, using your platform, basically roll their own Sofi competitor? Minus the investing bits?

Or something like credit karma has?

Do you need a large amount of money upfront?

Do you have a jobs page? Or a description what you're looking for and what tech you're using?

Small world - been a while, darragh. I’ll drop you a note and let’s catch up?

Did you guys acquire the domain or did the founders always have it ?

(Increase employee)

We took the approach of starting with an intentionally bad name (in our case, bnk.dev) and using it until a good domain became available to purchase for a reasonable price.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

do you have anyone on your enterprise BD/sales team? or is it too early for that type of role?

Do you consider non-US remote?

Certainly!

So non-US actors will have access to what banking data and source code?

What’s the problem with that? If non-US actors wanted to wreak havoc in the country there are much lower hanging fruits (that would also provide better “returns” on investment) than infiltrating a banking startup.

But few as thoroughly regulated. Wait until the regulators fall off of influence from those capitalizing on the outsourcing take. See PPP as an example of the system turning to new ventures to actually get anything done and the zenith of offshoring in general.

Do you really think your US banks have no overseas operations / outsourcing centers?

These will be increasingly attacked politically as the extent of identity and fraud on cloud become more common knowledge.

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