Increase Becomes Its Own Bank After Founder Acquires and Rebuilds Washington Community Lender
Increase Becomes Its Own Bank After Founder Acquires and Rebuilds Washington Community Lender #
Darragh Buckley, the first employee hired by Stripe and founder of banking infrastructure company Increase, has launched Increase Bank, a federally regulated, FDIC-member institution built on an acquired community bank in Washington state.
Buckley acquired Twin City Bancorp, the holding company for Twin City Bank in Longview, Washington, roughly one year ago, according to Banking Dive. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco approved his acquisition of 100 percent of the voting shares in June 2025. Following regulatory sign-off on the name and business plan changes, the bank was rebranded as Increase Bank. Twin City held roughly $114.6 million in assets as of March 31 and operates a single physical branch, which will remain open.
Buckley said the move had been a long time coming. He founded Increase six years ago with the goal of combining a bank and a technology company. His background shaped that direction: at Stripe, he spent six years building the company’s bank partnership with Wells Fargo and designing programmatic controls for deposit account structures. That experience with sponsor bank dependencies led him to conclude that the conventional banking-as-a-service model was structurally fragile.
The standard BaaS arrangement stacks a fintech, a middleware ledger provider, and a chartered sponsor bank on top of one another, creating three entities, three ledgers, and three compliance frameworks. In July 2024, the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC issued a joint supervisory warning about that structure, following a series of enforcement actions and the collapse of BaaS middleware firm Synapse. By operating as both technology provider and regulated bank, Increase consolidates that structure into a single entity.
Increase’s platform provides direct connections to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House, and Visa. Its technology serves as the real-time system of record for account balances and transactions, reconciling to the Fed on an ongoing basis. Fintechs routing payments through companies such as Stripe, Ramp, and Gusto have reportedly been using Increase’s rails without necessarily knowing it.
Jon Jones, a former CEO of Washington Business Bank and a board member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines, has been appointed president and CEO of Increase Bank. Buckley said existing partnerships with Grasshopper Bank, First Internet Bank of Indiana, and Core Bank remain in place, noting that many of Increase’s clients require multi-bank setups for operational or governance reasons.
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