What drove you to start Increase and what does the company do today?

I was the first employee at Stripe. One of the things I did was set up the original Wells Fargo integration. It was maddening! There were so many ways in which the product and experience that we wanted to bring to customers was limited by what their core could do. I think Stripe later worked around much of it, and what they’ve built today is much closer to the metal than what we had in the early days. But the experience showed me how important it is to build on solid infrastructure.

So I started thinking, well, what would the ideal core have been? I knew it had to be API-first: anything you can do by talking to someone you should be able to do from code. And I knew it had to connect to all of the networks directly — so much information got lost just by having a couple of layers in the middle that tried to abstract over the details. And I knew it had to be one system that would support accounts, ACH, wires, cards, real-time payments and checks.

Fast-forward a few years and we’re the system of record for some very large programs, including Ramp, Check and Pipe.

What key challenges do you see companies facing when embedding financial products?

There was a huge boom of startups a few years ago; that cohort is reaching their Series B or so. The strongest pattern we’re seeing between them is that they’re all building products that are tightly tailored for their verticals.

So one challenge is finding infrastructure that’s flexible and can support exactly the shape of the program that they want to run. The middleware that people typically start on have a cookie-cutter setup with respect to account structures and onboarding. That’s helpful for companies that are just getting started, but it also means that we see a lot of them around the time they hit product-market fit and are scaling, because they just need a more flexible partner.

Their needs vary. For payroll companies, that’s often things like supporting balanced ACH files or being really buttoned-up about settlement windows. For neo-banks, it’s often missing features like lockboxes, positive pay, or wire drawdowns. For bill pay companies, it’s things like unlimited account numbers and push-to-card.

How do you see embedded finance evolving in the next few years, and what role will platforms like Increase play in shaping that future?

One trend is what I was talking about above. A couple of years ago folks were trying to add a wallet and card into every app. Today I think founders are being more judicious and are tailoring their products to their customers’ needs more precisely. Lending is where the rubber really hits the road, because the signals to judge credit-worthiness vary so widely between industries.

Another long-running trend that we think will continue is the push towards faster and more transparent settlement. Some of this is real-time settlement, but some of it is just being able to be precise with folks about when a payment will land. “Two to five business days” isn’t competitive any more; “tomorrow in the 8:30am settlement window” is better.

How can people get ahold of you (or Increase) to learn more?

Email is best: darragh@increase.com will get you an answer quickly.

One personal question: What were your grandparents’ professions, and how do you think their work shaped your story?

My grandparents worked in very traditional Irish jobs: farming and the civil service. In two generations, the economic progress from their lives to mine has been huge. I feel incredibly lucky for that, and I hope I can create the same kind of step-change for my own kids.