Increase founder Darragh Buckley acquires stake in Twin City Bank as fintech eyes community banking

Most fintech founders want to disrupt banks. Darragh Buckley apparently wants to invest in them. Buckley, the founder and CEO of banking-as-a-service startup Increase, has acquired a controlling stake of over 10% in Twin City Bank, a community bank based in Longview, Washington. The transaction closed in mid-2025, triggered a Federal Reserve disclosure requirement, and received non-objection approval from the FDIC. Here’s the part that makes this interesting: Buckley says he has no intention of folding Twin City into Increase’s operations. A fintech founder buying banks, just not for the usual reasons Increase, which Buckley founded in 2020 after leaving Stripe, builds developer-friendly APIs for payments and deposits. Think ACH transfers, wire payments, and real-time transactions, packaged for fintech platforms that need banking infrastructure without building it themselves. Clients include Ramp and Check. The company runs lean, with roughly 30 employees, and processes over $100 billion annually. In the banking-as-a-service world, the conventional playbook right now involves acquiring a bank and converting it into a sponsor bank, essentially using it as the regulatory chassis for ...