43 ms·

Increase: Banking API

556 points by pen2l 4y ago

benjamaan 4y ago
Meanwhile https://offerzen.com/community/investec https://offerzen.com/community/investec
randomcatuser 4y ago
I'm a bit confused about why one would want to do this! If you become your own bank, what are the pieces you have to do yourself? (I imagine things like fraud?)
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  It seems like a great tool for financial fraud, phising schemes, laundering. What non-nefarious uses would it have?
  - meltedcapacitor 4y ago
    It's white-label banking, allows non-bank businesses to have a bank account product with their name on it, confusing everybody in the process. It's naff but not nefarious.
- impulser_ 4y ago
  You're not actually becoming a bank. They are just providing an API so you can act like a bank. Your money is still going to be held by an actual bank. The banking services are still being provided by an actual bank.
  - hbcondo714 4y ago
    Yeah, accounts are with First Internet Bank or Blue Ridge Bank: https://increase.com/terms https://increase.com/terms
- dang 4y ago
  Submitted title was "Increase: Become your own bank". Since that seems to be a bit confusing and I don't see that text on the page, I've reverted the title to what the page says.
  - zhivota 4y ago
    Yeah it's one of those things where it's not technically correct, but it's probably correct from the user's point of view. Customers of Increase will look a lot like a bank to an end user, but they'll be 2 layers removed from the actual bank, and everything they do will mention the actual bank's name on it for FDIC/regulatory purposes.
    - mousetree 4y ago
      FWIW, you won't be allowed to advertise yourself as a bank either.
amccloud 4y ago
How is this different from Stripe Treasury?
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Who are the target customers of Stripe Treasury? Existing banks who are fully ultra integrated with legacy mainframe offerings? Who is looking into open a new bank/credit union and like... how much money is needed? How do you compete with Ally or any other "online" bank? How do you build trust and get people to give you their money, and for what benefit to them?
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I don't see how this addresses the problem of building trust, though.
alaxic 4y ago
sv123 4y ago
Looks cool, but having trouble wrapping my head around a potential use case for this.
- chocolatkey 4y ago
  I have a real-life scenario that applies to my business: we employee 50+ freelancers ee pay every month. I dread when it comes time to pay them, because I have to log into multiple bank account and manually send each transfer using clunky web UIs. I am just copy-pasting all this data from a spreadsheet where it's already been verified. If I could automate payments to a sizeable portion of the freelancers, it would save me a lot of time and reduce potential for mistakes during data entry
  - ronakdesai 4y ago
    Check out mallo.io or feel free to email me ronak [at] mallo.io
  - swyx 4y ago
    ah ok. so this is a workaround of the traditional banks having crappy UI/APIs? what about using Stripe/Braintree/Paypal/etc (i know those are not exact matches, but just enquiring about the general problem space)
    - chocolatkey 4y ago
      This is completely different. Stripe/Braintree are ways to charge customers on their credit/debit card on your website, completely unwieldy for paying freelancers. You'd have to have freelancers set up Stripe merchant accounts and receive card payments, that would be very weird and broken use case, especially considering Stripe's fees. I can send a freelancer an ACH transfer for $0, why would I want to pay 3+%? As for PayPal, some freelancer (especially outside US) do get paid using it, but paypal's fees are outrageous and we try to get anyone we can on an alternative like zelle, ach etc.
      - adventured 4y ago
arthurcolle 4y ago
is this like Column?
- sebmellen 4y ago
  It appears to be virtually the same service as Column, but they lack their own bank.
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
  https://column.com/ https://column.com/ For those that don’t know what Column is.
- jo6gwb 4y ago
  Looks more like a Bond, Unit, Synapse.
wcoenen 4y ago
Is this like Vodeno in europe? When looking at job listings, I realized that Aion Bank appears to be just a marketing wrapper around Vodeno, which handles all the administration, technical stuff and even banking license and customer support.
c7b 4y ago
It sounds cool, but I don't fully understand: is this a fully-fledged US bank (with a banking license, FDIC insurance, audited,...) that allows you to do all banking transactions through an API, or is this a framework that you can use if you are already a bank to expose all your transactions through an API, or something else?
- Ayesh 4y ago
  I think they provide a backend so you can issue your own cards, with bank accounts routable through normal banking systems. Payoneer famously rely on third party "back-end" banks for their services, as they issue cards, offer routable bank accounts, cash withdrawal, etc. This is an extremely niche use case of course, but it's not the first time they popped up on HN at least. In mobile ISPs, MVNOs are quite common, and there is a large amount of customer base because they simplify KYC, sales, and customer on-boarding. Technically, this API should provide the platform to build a similar "Virtual bank". I do not think anybody without a significant technical and financial resources will be able to pull it off. Another use case I can think of are market places like ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress, etc. Each seller receive a bank account that they get their payments deposited to, and can be withdrawn from their branded card. I do not see this being a commercially viable option for many, because pretty much every country has free or almost free systems in place to simply transfer money, and not take the unnecessary burden of issue cards, maintaining bank accounts, etc. Payoneer used to run a similar program, with branded cards, custom fee structures, etc, but it eventually failed as far as I know.
  - chadash 4y ago
    curl -X "POST" \ --url https://api.increase.com/check_transfers \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ${INCREASE_API_KEY}" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d $'{ "account_id": "account0", "address_line1": "33 Liberty Street", "address_city": "New York", "address_state": "NY", "address_zip": "10045", "amount": 1000, "message": "Check payment", "recipient_name": "Ian Crease" }' Well it would certainly be nice if I can send a rent check from my command line!
songeater 4y ago
from TOS [0]: Increase is not a chartered depository institution. We work with our partner banks to provide depository and payment services. When you open an Increase account, you agree to the Increase Terms of Service below. When you use the Increase service to set up a deposit account, the account is with First Internet Bank or Blue Ridge Bank and is subject to your agreement with the Bank Terms below. Finally, Increase's use of your personal information is described in the Privacy Policy below. [0] https://increase.com/terms https://increase.com/terms
craftkiller 4y ago
Doesn't look like they provide an API for any sort of brokerage services. I have written a lot of sqlite to track my progress with buying/selling stock options but the biggest pain point for me is transcribing my transactions into my sqlite database. If they expand their API to brokerage services then this could be a killer feature for me.
ako 4y ago
Seems like bbaas, banking backend as a service, solves a significant need in the world, considering existing alternatives. For example in Europe there’s Mambu that seems to do something similar. Not sure what the exact customer pain is here, could be that banks were the first to adopt IT and now have a large legacy where there is little value in rebuilding it with modern stacks, as it offers little competitive differentiation. Or maybe there’s a need to quickly bring new banking products to market, and the backend stuff is so standardized that it’s best to buy it off the shelve.
- mousetree 4y ago
  There are lots of companies that are providing these BaaS in the US. Stripe, Modern Treasury, Treasury Prime, Lithic, SynapseFi, Gallileo, I2C come to mind. Probably another 20 more. Then there's of course many CBS providers including the more modern ones like Mambu.
darraghbuckley 4y ago
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.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  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?
- Ayesh 4y ago
  Do you consider non-US remote?
  - darraghbuckley 4y ago
    Certainly!
    - shaburn 4y ago
      So non-US actors will have access to what banking data and source code?
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        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.
        shaburn 4y ago
pen2l 4y ago
Their lead UI guy was previously the UI lead at Stripe. I think of him as someone who appreciates and understands the importance of well-thought-out UI so I'm looking forward to how Increase pans out for that reason in particular.
- anon1094 4y ago
  That's Benjamin De Cock. For the folks interested he documents a lot of his process on Twitter. https://twitter.com/bdc/status/1546866502225346560 https://twitter.com/bdc/status/1546866502225346560
- holler 4y ago
  Now it makes sense how their landing page is so impressive, and also reminds me of Stripe design.
  - benjamindc 4y ago
    Thank you, means a lot :)
    - pen2l 4y ago
      Oh hey, I'm a big fan! I think while others have commented on how beautiful your creations are, I rather admire you for the care and detail you put on UI. Beautiful things are not always easy to use, and things that are well-laid-out and easy-to-use are not always beautiful. You have somehow arrived at the magical place where you've got them both down.
      - benjamindc 4y ago
        Thank you, I'm glad you like it! I try to find a good balance between form and function, and create a consistent environment for the customer. The homepage is definitely more "artistic" than the dashboard, for instance, but hopefully they clearly belong to the same brand and give you a similar look and feel. (For the anecdote and because you mentioned it, it always annoyed me that we had a pretty different visual language at Stripe between the site and the dashboard. I designed Stripe's homepage but not its dashboard, whereas I did both at the same time for Increase. Consistency is really hard to achieve between multiple products as the optimal visual treatment is different for a site and an information-dense UI.)
Shindi 4y ago
How is this different than Column Stripe Treasury Treasury Prime Unit Cross River Bank Any BaaS I'm missing? ???
- alexjplant 4y ago
  My alma mater Moov Financial [0]. They also have a bunch of neat OSS libraries on GitHub [1]. [0] https://moov.io https://moov.io [1] https://github.com/moov-io https://github.com/moov-io
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ianhawes 4y ago
  Synapse FI (https://synapsefi.com https://synapsefi.com) -- They have been around for awhile.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    They use MongoDB for their ledger. Was not fun for us.
    - fierro 4y ago
      but isn't MongoDB webscale?
      - metadat 4y ago
        Webscale != bank-tegrity, bank-regulation scale, maytee.
- nerdinsf 4y ago
spraveenitpro 4y ago
Entinel 4y ago
I think by the amount of "what is this" questions in this thread it's pretty clear the messaging is confusing to say the least. I'm going to pile on because even with the explanations in this thread I don't really understand what this is. Is this for B2C or B2B? Is this something I, the average consumer who happens to be a developer, could use to build my own personal finance tools?
- zachthewf 4y ago
  It's a B2B2C product (sold to businesses that are building consumer fintech products). There are a bunch of neobank fintech startups whose offering is "Banking for X", where X is some segment of the population with specific needs that are not well served by traditional banks. (Here for example is X = "Spanish speakers in the US".) [0] To build a startup like that, you need to build a product layer on top of a banking API, which lets you avoid having to write code that hooks into payment rails, interfaces with credit card manufacturers, stores credit card numbers, etc. Now you can focus on the differentiating aspects of your user base instead of building common banking infra. There are a bunch of companies that offer banking APIs as a service already. The most popular of these is Galileo, a 20 year old company that was recently acquired by SoFi [1]. The developer experience of Galileo is absolute trash. I haven't used any other companies first hand but I've heard they're not much better. So presumably Increase is trying to provide an actually good developer experience for devs building banking products. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/seis https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/seis [1] https://www.sofi.com/press/sofi-to-acquire-galileo https://www.sofi.com/press/sofi-to-acquire-galileo
  - swyx 4y ago
    ok so followup question - lets say i buy this message and want to start "Banking for Medical Students" (well known gap, they have terrible credit history but are about to be good credits). The precise segment doesnt matter, my question is - how much of the banking capital requirements do i need to put up? because a bank isn't just about payment rails and credit cards, its also about having literal cash in the bank right?
    - deleted 4y ago
chadash 4y ago
> Accounts are eligible to receive interest on balances. The interest rate is the Federal Funds Target Rate less 50 basis points with a floor of 0%. Target rate right now is 2.25-2.50%, so i'm guessing that you are subtracting 50 BP from the lower end, so that's 1.75%. That's actually pretty good for a bank right now (not the highest, but certainly on the higher end. One thing that's unclear... is this a checking account, savings, etc.?
rthomas6 4y ago
Is there any service like this for individuals? Specifically, I want to be able to open and close checking accounts at will with different card numbers, with different spending limits. The purpose would be to serve as an envelope system and budgeting tool.
- Shindi 4y ago
  If you're an enterprising individuals you can "kinda" do this but it's not easy and definitely 100% a headache. Neobanks sometimes use this notion of a virtual bank account. My understanding is that it's a single FDIC insured account that they subdivide using their own ledger. For cards, you can use Stripe Treasury or Lithic to issue your own virtual cards and their dev limits are pretty friendly. I think privacy.com does this as a consumer experience really well. Note you said `checking accounts at will with different card numbers`. Depository accounts are a totally different notion and resource than cards. However should you do this? I can't think of a reason why you'd want to for your own purposes. The reason fintech is so annoying is not because banks/tech players don't want you to have nice things, is that there is a ridiculous amount of regulatory overhead.
  - rthomas6 4y ago
    > I can't think of a reason why you'd want to for your own purposes. It's quite simple. For argument's sake let's say I am an individual with limited willpower. Say I budget $200 per month on restaurants, and I need to stick to this to meet some other financial goal. How, as someone with limited willpower, do I enforce this? Option 1 is to keep track of and categorize all bank transactions, either manually or via a third party budgeting app, and check my "restaurant" balance each time before I order food. This is unlikely to happen because I am lazy and assume I have the money. Option 2 is to keep a physical envelope of cash that I put $200 in. When the money runs out, I don't have any to buy restaurant food. This works, but is very inconvenient. How can I use Doordash, Venmo a friend, etc with this? Option 3 is to have a debit card that only has restaurant money on it. Now the card simply doesn't work anymore when I'm out of money. It's effectively the same as the envelope, but now I can use it online as well.
bankapilead 4y ago
I led a team building a similar thing for one of the existing big three bank technology companies. Hope you've got backpressure and all the compliance work locked-in. Outages and some serious audits are in your future integrating with those more legacy bank cores. Wish your team all the best! This sort of innovation / competition is needed in that space.
moneywoes 4y ago
How is this different
orliesaurus 4y ago
I wonder if these banking startups are part of the fallout of the leadership exodus at Stripe that has been happening recently?
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Really curious who does the design for Increase! Do you guys have a founding designer?
- chirau 4y ago
  Benjamin de Cock. Formerly Stripe's homepage designer.
mauz 4y ago
Seems to be similar to Modern Treasury [1]. Are the use-cases similar between Increase and [1]? [1]: https://www.moderntreasury.com/ https://www.moderntreasury.com/
- mousetree 4y ago
  Modern Treasury don't offer any card rails.
bob1029 4y ago
> Anything that you can achieve with PDFs, presence, and persistence in a bank branch you can do with our API. Not sure how to take this. With a small tweak like "you can eventually do" I would let it pass without criticism. I work with bank cores, imaging, BSA and related middleware on a daily basis. The scope and complexity of these systems is incomprehensible to most. Many of our clients don't even try to think about how fucked up their business is. They prefer to hire Deloitte and other vendors like us to be stressed about it for them. To give you an idea of how comprehensive a "full" banking API is, our combined WSDL and XSD references total ~9 megabytes. This is before codegen. The final reference sources as generated into the .NET codebase total nearly 20 megabytes. This is just the types & method signatures. The actual implementations live in an IBM system manufactured some time during the previous millennium. But, none of that really matters. Whatever API method you call against a specific bank will have behavior that ultimately depends on a million things specific to them _and the region within which they operate_. So, its not enough to simply integrate with this massive API. You also have to understand a multi-dimensional matrix of regulations, end-customer behaviors, technological constraints, active geopolitical affairs, et. al.
- sofixa 4y ago
  Traditional banks have literally decades of legacy to deal with which drags them down. Many neobanks have shown that it's possible to provide a better and cheaper service when you start from scratch. A few examples of features neobanks i use provide that traditional banks don't have - virtual cards on the fly, for free; SEPA Instant for free; Open API; smart dynamic budgeting and expense sharing.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    > legacy to deal with which drags them down A non-zero amount of that legacy is due to regulations and compliance. Most of what a bank does is totally invisible to the end customer. A "neobank" is almost always just a shiny consumer-oriented facade in front of a grumpy old bank. Someone still has to follow all of those laws.
    - 4y ago
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
From reading the comments there are two groups of people. People who don't know what a banking API is and why you'd need one. And people who do but don't understand how Increase is different from existing Banking API / Banking As A Service solutions. I'm in the latter.
bun_at_work 4y ago
Does this change KYC requirements or similar regulatory constraints that exist for implementing ACH transactions directly?
EGreg 4y ago
Only in USA ? Or what
londons_explore 4y ago
I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super easy... a banking API so you can split the million dollars you want to launder into 1 million 1 dollar payments. And an API client which lets you treat each login cookie and account as an object in python. Before long, the API and all users who had ever used it were perma-banned from the bank, because it was determined they posed too high a fraud/money-laundering risk. I'm still salty because, after spending a week of my life building and refining that API, they banned me and 6 years later still claim they can't return the $350 that was in the account because they are still 'investigating'.
- blantonl 4y ago
  No good deed does unpunished.
  - yboris 4y ago
    I think this is one of the most unfortunate memes that people for some reason still continue to share. Think about what it teaches children when they hear it? What kind of a world view does it instill? By saying the phrase you are explicitly communicating the idea that it is (at least is some sense) better to not do good deeds.
    - NoboruWataya 4y ago
      I don't think people are out there teaching kids to live their lives by this mantra. It's not intended to be a life philosophy, more of a bleak and darkly humorous observation. Sure, it's not always true, but it sure does feel like it sometimes. Kind of like "life's a bitch, and then you die", it's not meant to be taken too seriously.
      - 4y ago
PKop 4y ago
Stripe for neobanks
- mousetree 4y ago
  Stripe are already in the game themselves with Stripe Issuing and Treasury
londons_explore 4y ago
It's notable that Monzo (UK fintech bank, but now in many countries) has a fairly complete but not really advertised API. Their mobile app uses the same API. If you need to know which emoji is most representative of the shop where you used your card 7 seconds ago, you can get sent that (and a lot of other data) in a webhook...
- Reason077 4y ago
  Not sure about Monzo specifically, but all the major UK banks are required by the UK regulators to provide standard open banking APIs: https://www.openbanking.org.uk https://www.openbanking.org.uk In practice this means that any UK financial app that supports open banking should be able to connect to an account at any UK bank that implements open banking.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Open banking is really just an automated way to view your statement. It doesn't allow sending money to someone, creating a new bank account, closing an account, changing your email or postal address, setting up a pension or credit card, or any of the other actions you might want to do at your bank.
    - Reason077 4y ago
      Transaction data via API is much more than just viewing a statement. Being able to access this in a standardised way is a huge win for all sorts of financial and accounting apps, as well as certain specialised industries (credit checking, rental agents, etc) And open banking does support "sending money to someone" (variable recurring payments), subject of course to some security constraints. You wouldn't want to just let every random app that you let access your bank account initiate any transaction it wanted without an additional authorisation step, would you? Everything else you mention is a pretty infrequent and specialised transaction and the benefit to having an API would be minimal. (OK, I could see value in an app that automatically updated your address etc with every company you have a relationship with, but that would require a common API across many industries, not just banking)
dedoussis 4y ago
How is this different to Stripe's Banking-as-a-Service product?
fibonacc 4y ago
How can Canadian developers use this to gain access to US markets?
me_bx 4y ago
Is there any information on the website about the company providing the service, and/or its founder(s)? I found the official name "Increase, Inc" in the privacy policy page, but nothing more. Aren't these fundamentals to build trust, especially for a B2B banking product?
melony 4y ago
How do you plan to compete against https://column.com/ https://column.com/?
- shaburn 4y ago
  Agree. Seems crazy at this point, especially without an about us page. Going this route vs Column would seem like career suicide, at first glance.
alberth 4y ago
> “Our API faithfully exposes the data and capabilities of the Federal Reserve, Visa, The Clearing House, depository networks, and accounting tools. It’s lovingly boring and exceptionally powerful.” Two questions: 1. How is this different than Open Banking? 2. Why is Visa referenced / why isn’t Mastercard included? (Is it because Mastercard owns Finicity, and Open Banking service)
Ycombigatorz 4y ago
yowlingcat 4y ago
Two questions: 1) What does this provide over other BaaS vendors, for example Treasury Prime, Unit, Synapse, Lithic, etc? 2) Why are the ACH fees so horrifically high? Even a fifth of that is really on the high end.
jmacd 4y ago
Does anyone else have the feeling that Plaid is some house of cards that is all going to come crashing down sooner or later?
smohnot 4y ago
see also: http://unit.co http://unit.co you can programatically create accounts & cards and test with real money - in minutes! https://www.unit.co/how-to-build https://www.unit.co/how-to-build
nwatson 4y ago
All you need already is at Solid Financial at https://www.solidfi.com/docs/introduction https://www.solidfi.com/docs/introduction (Developer Center). Recently raised $63M Series B.
sealthedeal 4y ago
The underlying banks are Blue Ridge Bank and First Internet Bank terms. Blue ridge is popular for powering BAAS companies like Unit. Not sure of First Internet Bank, but both of these are legit, and the fact that they got two banks to start with is a great accomplishment.
sealthedeal 4y ago
fwiw, bnk.dev was a dope name, I think it has more virility :). Congrats on the launch.
sealthedeal 4y ago
If you want international banking APIs just use routefusion.com
ffff__ddan 4y ago
Sounds a lot like https://www.solarisgroup.com/en/ https://www.solarisgroup.com/en/
ryaniscool 4y ago
I'm in the banking API space. Yes, the current technology is decrepit and garbage. It's not the bottleneck though. Risk management and underwriting is. If you want to build a SaaS in this space, the hard part is figuring out how to vet customers cheaply and quickly. Every customer you sign up is a potential OFAC (Office of Foreign Access Control), BSA (Banking Secrecy Act), or AML (Anti-Money Laundering) violation.
lakomen 4y ago
German banking is in such a bad place right now, because of, mildly put, overregulation by the EU. In reality it's them trying to create arbitrary markets. You can no longer use the old API that worked well, where you login once and can do whatever. Every single action now has to be authorized with an OTP ( tan ). If you're building a shop and would like to automate payments, incoming or outgoing, you can't do that anymore without a) exposing your account data to 3rd parties and b) for free. This is one of the reasons why I say that the EU is corrupt. Ok so I tried to play their game, and asked the BAFIN what I had to do in order to become such an entity. I wrote 5 mails back and forth over the course of 3 months, not a single response had clear, concrete instructions on who to wrote to and what to send them. I had to read some hard to find article about PSD2 to know that I have to pay the Bundesdruckerei for a certificate, x509, every year, in order to be able to query the XS2A api. It's dirty, exclusive and corrupt and no one is doing anything about it.
- Gys 4y ago
  Its not the EU. Banks just do not want do deal with individuals using their API. That is not their business. Support is too expensive.

556 points by pen2l 4y ago

Meanwhile https://offerzen.com/community/investec https://offerzen.com/community/investec

I'm a bit confused about why one would want to do this! If you become your own bank, what are the pieces you have to do yourself? (I imagine things like fraud?)

iancmceachern 4y ago
It seems like a great tool for financial fraud, phising schemes, laundering. What non-nefarious uses would it have?
- meltedcapacitor 4y ago
  It's white-label banking, allows non-bank businesses to have a bank account product with their name on it, confusing everybody in the process. It's naff but not nefarious.
impulser_ 4y ago
You're not actually becoming a bank. They are just providing an API so you can act like a bank. Your money is still going to be held by an actual bank. The banking services are still being provided by an actual bank.
- hbcondo714 4y ago
  Yeah, accounts are with First Internet Bank or Blue Ridge Bank: https://increase.com/terms https://increase.com/terms
dang 4y ago
Submitted title was "Increase: Become your own bank". Since that seems to be a bit confusing and I don't see that text on the page, I've reverted the title to what the page says.
- zhivota 4y ago
  Yeah it's one of those things where it's not technically correct, but it's probably correct from the user's point of view. Customers of Increase will look a lot like a bank to an end user, but they'll be 2 layers removed from the actual bank, and everything they do will mention the actual bank's name on it for FDIC/regulatory purposes.
  - mousetree 4y ago
    FWIW, you won't be allowed to advertise yourself as a bank either.

amccloud 4y ago

How is this different from Stripe Treasury?

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Who are the target customers of Stripe Treasury? Existing banks who are fully ultra integrated with legacy mainframe offerings? Who is looking into open a new bank/credit union and like... how much money is needed? How do you compete with Ally or any other "online" bank? How do you build trust and get people to give you their money, and for what benefit to them?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I don't see how this addresses the problem of building trust, though.

alaxic 4y ago

sv123 4y ago

Looks cool, but having trouble wrapping my head around a potential use case for this.

chocolatkey 4y ago
I have a real-life scenario that applies to my business: we employee 50+ freelancers ee pay every month. I dread when it comes time to pay them, because I have to log into multiple bank account and manually send each transfer using clunky web UIs. I am just copy-pasting all this data from a spreadsheet where it's already been verified. If I could automate payments to a sizeable portion of the freelancers, it would save me a lot of time and reduce potential for mistakes during data entry
- ronakdesai 4y ago
  Check out mallo.io or feel free to email me ronak [at] mallo.io
- swyx 4y ago
  ah ok. so this is a workaround of the traditional banks having crappy UI/APIs? what about using Stripe/Braintree/Paypal/etc (i know those are not exact matches, but just enquiring about the general problem space)
  - chocolatkey 4y ago
    This is completely different. Stripe/Braintree are ways to charge customers on their credit/debit card on your website, completely unwieldy for paying freelancers. You'd have to have freelancers set up Stripe merchant accounts and receive card payments, that would be very weird and broken use case, especially considering Stripe's fees. I can send a freelancer an ACH transfer for $0, why would I want to pay 3+%? As for PayPal, some freelancer (especially outside US) do get paid using it, but paypal's fees are outrageous and we try to get anyone we can on an alternative like zelle, ach etc.
    - adventured 4y ago

arthurcolle 4y ago

is this like Column?

sebmellen 4y ago
It appears to be virtually the same service as Column, but they lack their own bank.
lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
https://column.com/ https://column.com/ For those that don’t know what Column is.
jo6gwb 4y ago
Looks more like a Bond, Unit, Synapse.

wcoenen 4y ago

Is this like Vodeno in europe? When looking at job listings, I realized that Aion Bank appears to be just a marketing wrapper around Vodeno, which handles all the administration, technical stuff and even banking license and customer support.

c7b 4y ago

It sounds cool, but I don't fully understand: is this a fully-fledged US bank (with a banking license, FDIC insurance, audited,...) that allows you to do all banking transactions through an API, or is this a framework that you can use if you are already a bank to expose all your transactions through an API, or something else?

Ayesh 4y ago
I think they provide a backend so you can issue your own cards, with bank accounts routable through normal banking systems. Payoneer famously rely on third party "back-end" banks for their services, as they issue cards, offer routable bank accounts, cash withdrawal, etc. This is an extremely niche use case of course, but it's not the first time they popped up on HN at least. In mobile ISPs, MVNOs are quite common, and there is a large amount of customer base because they simplify KYC, sales, and customer on-boarding. Technically, this API should provide the platform to build a similar "Virtual bank". I do not think anybody without a significant technical and financial resources will be able to pull it off. Another use case I can think of are market places like ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress, etc. Each seller receive a bank account that they get their payments deposited to, and can be withdrawn from their branded card. I do not see this being a commercially viable option for many, because pretty much every country has free or almost free systems in place to simply transfer money, and not take the unnecessary burden of issue cards, maintaining bank accounts, etc. Payoneer used to run a similar program, with branded cards, custom fee structures, etc, but it eventually failed as far as I know.
- chadash 4y ago
  curl -X "POST" \ --url https://api.increase.com/check_transfers \ -H "Authorization: Bearer ${INCREASE_API_KEY}" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d $'{ "account_id": "account0", "address_line1": "33 Liberty Street", "address_city": "New York", "address_state": "NY", "address_zip": "10045", "amount": 1000, "message": "Check payment", "recipient_name": "Ian Crease" }' Well it would certainly be nice if I can send a rent check from my command line!

songeater 4y ago

from TOS [0]: Increase is not a chartered depository institution. We work with our partner banks to provide depository and payment services. When you open an Increase account, you agree to the Increase Terms of Service below. When you use the Increase service to set up a deposit account, the account is with First Internet Bank or Blue Ridge Bank and is subject to your agreement with the Bank Terms below. Finally, Increase's use of your personal information is described in the Privacy Policy below. [0] https://increase.com/terms https://increase.com/terms

craftkiller 4y ago

Doesn't look like they provide an API for any sort of brokerage services. I have written a lot of sqlite to track my progress with buying/selling stock options but the biggest pain point for me is transcribing my transactions into my sqlite database. If they expand their API to brokerage services then this could be a killer feature for me.

ako 4y ago

Seems like bbaas, banking backend as a service, solves a significant need in the world, considering existing alternatives. For example in Europe there’s Mambu that seems to do something similar. Not sure what the exact customer pain is here, could be that banks were the first to adopt IT and now have a large legacy where there is little value in rebuilding it with modern stacks, as it offers little competitive differentiation. Or maybe there’s a need to quickly bring new banking products to market, and the backend stuff is so standardized that it’s best to buy it off the shelve.

mousetree 4y ago
There are lots of companies that are providing these BaaS in the US. Stripe, Modern Treasury, Treasury Prime, Lithic, SynapseFi, Gallileo, I2C come to mind. Probably another 20 more. Then there's of course many CBS providers including the more modern ones like Mambu.

darraghbuckley 4y ago

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.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
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?
Ayesh 4y ago
Do you consider non-US remote?
- darraghbuckley 4y ago
  Certainly!
  - shaburn 4y ago
    So non-US actors will have access to what banking data and source code?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      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.
      - shaburn 4y ago

pen2l 4y ago

Their lead UI guy was previously the UI lead at Stripe. I think of him as someone who appreciates and understands the importance of well-thought-out UI so I'm looking forward to how Increase pans out for that reason in particular.

anon1094 4y ago
That's Benjamin De Cock. For the folks interested he documents a lot of his process on Twitter. https://twitter.com/bdc/status/1546866502225346560 https://twitter.com/bdc/status/1546866502225346560
holler 4y ago
Now it makes sense how their landing page is so impressive, and also reminds me of Stripe design.
- benjamindc 4y ago
  Thank you, means a lot :)
  - pen2l 4y ago
    Oh hey, I'm a big fan! I think while others have commented on how beautiful your creations are, I rather admire you for the care and detail you put on UI. Beautiful things are not always easy to use, and things that are well-laid-out and easy-to-use are not always beautiful. You have somehow arrived at the magical place where you've got them both down.
    - benjamindc 4y ago
      Thank you, I'm glad you like it! I try to find a good balance between form and function, and create a consistent environment for the customer. The homepage is definitely more "artistic" than the dashboard, for instance, but hopefully they clearly belong to the same brand and give you a similar look and feel. (For the anecdote and because you mentioned it, it always annoyed me that we had a pretty different visual language at Stripe between the site and the dashboard. I designed Stripe's homepage but not its dashboard, whereas I did both at the same time for Increase. Consistency is really hard to achieve between multiple products as the optimal visual treatment is different for a site and an information-dense UI.)

Shindi 4y ago

How is this different than Column Stripe Treasury Treasury Prime Unit Cross River Bank Any BaaS I'm missing? ???

alexjplant 4y ago
My alma mater Moov Financial [0]. They also have a bunch of neat OSS libraries on GitHub [1]. [0] https://moov.io https://moov.io [1] https://github.com/moov-io https://github.com/moov-io
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ianhawes 4y ago
Synapse FI (https://synapsefi.com https://synapsefi.com) -- They have been around for awhile.
- mousetree 4y ago
  They use MongoDB for their ledger. Was not fun for us.
  - fierro 4y ago
    but isn't MongoDB webscale?
    - metadat 4y ago
      Webscale != bank-tegrity, bank-regulation scale, maytee.
nerdinsf 4y ago

spraveenitpro 4y ago

Entinel 4y ago

I think by the amount of "what is this" questions in this thread it's pretty clear the messaging is confusing to say the least. I'm going to pile on because even with the explanations in this thread I don't really understand what this is. Is this for B2C or B2B? Is this something I, the average consumer who happens to be a developer, could use to build my own personal finance tools?

zachthewf 4y ago
It's a B2B2C product (sold to businesses that are building consumer fintech products). There are a bunch of neobank fintech startups whose offering is "Banking for X", where X is some segment of the population with specific needs that are not well served by traditional banks. (Here for example is X = "Spanish speakers in the US".) [0] To build a startup like that, you need to build a product layer on top of a banking API, which lets you avoid having to write code that hooks into payment rails, interfaces with credit card manufacturers, stores credit card numbers, etc. Now you can focus on the differentiating aspects of your user base instead of building common banking infra. There are a bunch of companies that offer banking APIs as a service already. The most popular of these is Galileo, a 20 year old company that was recently acquired by SoFi [1]. The developer experience of Galileo is absolute trash. I haven't used any other companies first hand but I've heard they're not much better. So presumably Increase is trying to provide an actually good developer experience for devs building banking products. [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/seis https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/seis [1] https://www.sofi.com/press/sofi-to-acquire-galileo https://www.sofi.com/press/sofi-to-acquire-galileo
- swyx 4y ago
  ok so followup question - lets say i buy this message and want to start "Banking for Medical Students" (well known gap, they have terrible credit history but are about to be good credits). The precise segment doesnt matter, my question is - how much of the banking capital requirements do i need to put up? because a bank isn't just about payment rails and credit cards, its also about having literal cash in the bank right?
  - deleted 4y ago

chadash 4y ago

> Accounts are eligible to receive interest on balances. The interest rate is the Federal Funds Target Rate less 50 basis points with a floor of 0%. Target rate right now is 2.25-2.50%, so i'm guessing that you are subtracting 50 BP from the lower end, so that's 1.75%. That's actually pretty good for a bank right now (not the highest, but certainly on the higher end. One thing that's unclear... is this a checking account, savings, etc.?

rthomas6 4y ago

Is there any service like this for individuals? Specifically, I want to be able to open and close checking accounts at will with different card numbers, with different spending limits. The purpose would be to serve as an envelope system and budgeting tool.

Shindi 4y ago
If you're an enterprising individuals you can "kinda" do this but it's not easy and definitely 100% a headache. Neobanks sometimes use this notion of a virtual bank account. My understanding is that it's a single FDIC insured account that they subdivide using their own ledger. For cards, you can use Stripe Treasury or Lithic to issue your own virtual cards and their dev limits are pretty friendly. I think privacy.com does this as a consumer experience really well. Note you said `checking accounts at will with different card numbers`. Depository accounts are a totally different notion and resource than cards. However should you do this? I can't think of a reason why you'd want to for your own purposes. The reason fintech is so annoying is not because banks/tech players don't want you to have nice things, is that there is a ridiculous amount of regulatory overhead.
- rthomas6 4y ago
  > I can't think of a reason why you'd want to for your own purposes. It's quite simple. For argument's sake let's say I am an individual with limited willpower. Say I budget $200 per month on restaurants, and I need to stick to this to meet some other financial goal. How, as someone with limited willpower, do I enforce this? Option 1 is to keep track of and categorize all bank transactions, either manually or via a third party budgeting app, and check my "restaurant" balance each time before I order food. This is unlikely to happen because I am lazy and assume I have the money. Option 2 is to keep a physical envelope of cash that I put $200 in. When the money runs out, I don't have any to buy restaurant food. This works, but is very inconvenient. How can I use Doordash, Venmo a friend, etc with this? Option 3 is to have a debit card that only has restaurant money on it. Now the card simply doesn't work anymore when I'm out of money. It's effectively the same as the envelope, but now I can use it online as well.

bankapilead 4y ago

I led a team building a similar thing for one of the existing big three bank technology companies. Hope you've got backpressure and all the compliance work locked-in. Outages and some serious audits are in your future integrating with those more legacy bank cores. Wish your team all the best! This sort of innovation / competition is needed in that space.

moneywoes 4y ago

How is this different

orliesaurus 4y ago

I wonder if these banking startups are part of the fallout of the leadership exodus at Stripe that has been happening recently?

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Really curious who does the design for Increase! Do you guys have a founding designer?

chirau 4y ago
Benjamin de Cock. Formerly Stripe's homepage designer.

mauz 4y ago

Seems to be similar to Modern Treasury [1]. Are the use-cases similar between Increase and [1]? [1]: https://www.moderntreasury.com/ https://www.moderntreasury.com/

mousetree 4y ago
Modern Treasury don't offer any card rails.

bob1029 4y ago

> Anything that you can achieve with PDFs, presence, and persistence in a bank branch you can do with our API. Not sure how to take this. With a small tweak like "you can eventually do" I would let it pass without criticism. I work with bank cores, imaging, BSA and related middleware on a daily basis. The scope and complexity of these systems is incomprehensible to most. Many of our clients don't even try to think about how fucked up their business is. They prefer to hire Deloitte and other vendors like us to be stressed about it for them. To give you an idea of how comprehensive a "full" banking API is, our combined WSDL and XSD references total ~9 megabytes. This is before codegen. The final reference sources as generated into the .NET codebase total nearly 20 megabytes. This is just the types & method signatures. The actual implementations live in an IBM system manufactured some time during the previous millennium. But, none of that really matters. Whatever API method you call against a specific bank will have behavior that ultimately depends on a million things specific to them _and the region within which they operate_. So, its not enough to simply integrate with this massive API. You also have to understand a multi-dimensional matrix of regulations, end-customer behaviors, technological constraints, active geopolitical affairs, et. al.

sofixa 4y ago
Traditional banks have literally decades of legacy to deal with which drags them down. Many neobanks have shown that it's possible to provide a better and cheaper service when you start from scratch. A few examples of features neobanks i use provide that traditional banks don't have - virtual cards on the fly, for free; SEPA Instant for free; Open API; smart dynamic budgeting and expense sharing.
- bob1029 4y ago
  > legacy to deal with which drags them down A non-zero amount of that legacy is due to regulations and compliance. Most of what a bank does is totally invisible to the end customer. A "neobank" is almost always just a shiny consumer-oriented facade in front of a grumpy old bank. Someone still has to follow all of those laws.
  - 4y ago

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

From reading the comments there are two groups of people. People who don't know what a banking API is and why you'd need one. And people who do but don't understand how Increase is different from existing Banking API / Banking As A Service solutions. I'm in the latter.

bun_at_work 4y ago

Does this change KYC requirements or similar regulatory constraints that exist for implementing ACH transactions directly?

EGreg 4y ago

Only in USA ? Or what

londons_explore 4y ago

I made an API for a bank... I was a third party and made the API by screen scraping their webUI. I sent their devs a link and initially there were positive messages going back and forth. The API allowed you to see balance, transaction history, and make payments. Before long, the API got quite popular, and lots of people were using it to make lots of payments automatically. You know what makes money laundering super easy... a banking API so you can split the million dollars you want to launder into 1 million 1 dollar payments. And an API client which lets you treat each login cookie and account as an object in python. Before long, the API and all users who had ever used it were perma-banned from the bank, because it was determined they posed too high a fraud/money-laundering risk. I'm still salty because, after spending a week of my life building and refining that API, they banned me and 6 years later still claim they can't return the $350 that was in the account because they are still 'investigating'.

blantonl 4y ago
No good deed does unpunished.
- yboris 4y ago
  I think this is one of the most unfortunate memes that people for some reason still continue to share. Think about what it teaches children when they hear it? What kind of a world view does it instill? By saying the phrase you are explicitly communicating the idea that it is (at least is some sense) better to not do good deeds.
  - NoboruWataya 4y ago
    I don't think people are out there teaching kids to live their lives by this mantra. It's not intended to be a life philosophy, more of a bleak and darkly humorous observation. Sure, it's not always true, but it sure does feel like it sometimes. Kind of like "life's a bitch, and then you die", it's not meant to be taken too seriously.
    - 4y ago

PKop 4y ago

Stripe for neobanks

mousetree 4y ago
Stripe are already in the game themselves with Stripe Issuing and Treasury

londons_explore 4y ago

It's notable that Monzo (UK fintech bank, but now in many countries) has a fairly complete but not really advertised API. Their mobile app uses the same API. If you need to know which emoji is most representative of the shop where you used your card 7 seconds ago, you can get sent that (and a lot of other data) in a webhook...

Reason077 4y ago
Not sure about Monzo specifically, but all the major UK banks are required by the UK regulators to provide standard open banking APIs: https://www.openbanking.org.uk https://www.openbanking.org.uk In practice this means that any UK financial app that supports open banking should be able to connect to an account at any UK bank that implements open banking.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Open banking is really just an automated way to view your statement. It doesn't allow sending money to someone, creating a new bank account, closing an account, changing your email or postal address, setting up a pension or credit card, or any of the other actions you might want to do at your bank.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    Transaction data via API is much more than just viewing a statement. Being able to access this in a standardised way is a huge win for all sorts of financial and accounting apps, as well as certain specialised industries (credit checking, rental agents, etc) And open banking does support "sending money to someone" (variable recurring payments), subject of course to some security constraints. You wouldn't want to just let every random app that you let access your bank account initiate any transaction it wanted without an additional authorisation step, would you? Everything else you mention is a pretty infrequent and specialised transaction and the benefit to having an API would be minimal. (OK, I could see value in an app that automatically updated your address etc with every company you have a relationship with, but that would require a common API across many industries, not just banking)

dedoussis 4y ago

How is this different to Stripe's Banking-as-a-Service product?

fibonacc 4y ago

How can Canadian developers use this to gain access to US markets?

me_bx 4y ago

Is there any information on the website about the company providing the service, and/or its founder(s)? I found the official name "Increase, Inc" in the privacy policy page, but nothing more. Aren't these fundamentals to build trust, especially for a B2B banking product?

melony 4y ago

How do you plan to compete against https://column.com/ https://column.com/?

shaburn 4y ago
Agree. Seems crazy at this point, especially without an about us page. Going this route vs Column would seem like career suicide, at first glance.

alberth 4y ago

> “Our API faithfully exposes the data and capabilities of the Federal Reserve, Visa, The Clearing House, depository networks, and accounting tools. It’s lovingly boring and exceptionally powerful.” Two questions: 1. How is this different than Open Banking? 2. Why is Visa referenced / why isn’t Mastercard included? (Is it because Mastercard owns Finicity, and Open Banking service)

Ycombigatorz 4y ago

yowlingcat 4y ago

Two questions: 1) What does this provide over other BaaS vendors, for example Treasury Prime, Unit, Synapse, Lithic, etc? 2) Why are the ACH fees so horrifically high? Even a fifth of that is really on the high end.

jmacd 4y ago

Does anyone else have the feeling that Plaid is some house of cards that is all going to come crashing down sooner or later?

smohnot 4y ago

see also: http://unit.co http://unit.co you can programatically create accounts & cards and test with real money - in minutes! https://www.unit.co/how-to-build https://www.unit.co/how-to-build

nwatson 4y ago

All you need already is at Solid Financial at https://www.solidfi.com/docs/introduction https://www.solidfi.com/docs/introduction (Developer Center). Recently raised $63M Series B.

sealthedeal 4y ago

The underlying banks are Blue Ridge Bank and First Internet Bank terms. Blue ridge is popular for powering BAAS companies like Unit. Not sure of First Internet Bank, but both of these are legit, and the fact that they got two banks to start with is a great accomplishment.

sealthedeal 4y ago

fwiw, bnk.dev was a dope name, I think it has more virility :). Congrats on the launch.

sealthedeal 4y ago

If you want international banking APIs just use routefusion.com

ffff__ddan 4y ago

Sounds a lot like https://www.solarisgroup.com/en/ https://www.solarisgroup.com/en/

ryaniscool 4y ago

I'm in the banking API space. Yes, the current technology is decrepit and garbage. It's not the bottleneck though. Risk management and underwriting is. If you want to build a SaaS in this space, the hard part is figuring out how to vet customers cheaply and quickly. Every customer you sign up is a potential OFAC (Office of Foreign Access Control), BSA (Banking Secrecy Act), or AML (Anti-Money Laundering) violation.

lakomen 4y ago

German banking is in such a bad place right now, because of, mildly put, overregulation by the EU. In reality it's them trying to create arbitrary markets. You can no longer use the old API that worked well, where you login once and can do whatever. Every single action now has to be authorized with an OTP ( tan ). If you're building a shop and would like to automate payments, incoming or outgoing, you can't do that anymore without a) exposing your account data to 3rd parties and b) for free. This is one of the reasons why I say that the EU is corrupt. Ok so I tried to play their game, and asked the BAFIN what I had to do in order to become such an entity. I wrote 5 mails back and forth over the course of 3 months, not a single response had clear, concrete instructions on who to wrote to and what to send them. I had to read some hard to find article about PSD2 to know that I have to pay the Bundesdruckerei for a certificate, x509, every year, in order to be able to query the XS2A api. It's dirty, exclusive and corrupt and no one is doing anything about it.

Gys 4y ago
Its not the EU. Banks just do not want do deal with individuals using their API. That is not their business. Support is too expensive.