How Does Product at Increase Differ From Stripe?

Darragh Buckley draws a hard line between product at Stripe and product at Increase. Stripe builds a clean abstraction so a developer who cares about payments never has to care about ACH or Fedwire. Increase does the opposite with the FedACH API: a parameter keeps the exact name the network already uses, and Increase does not invent a creative layer on top.

The rails underneath already moved as one system. Fedwire shifted to the international standard ISO 20022 at one moment, a hard cutover across the financial institutions of the nation. A transition like that looks like Y2K, the midnight rollover where you expect everything to break. The Federal Reserve was under constraints, so a hard cutover was the plan that made the most sense, and it worked after months and months of planning, testing, and operations. Success meant nobody read on the front page of the paper that wires across the nation had stopped.

He treats the fundamental layer of U.S. deposit area networks as strong, including real-time payments. The missing piece is the last mile: high-fidelity pass-through of the data and the capability. Someone can sit on all the technology and still fail to expose it, and exposing it correctly is not trivial.