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?
Increase: Banking API
31–40 of 305 posts
Re: Increase: Banking API
#32Looks cool, but having trouble wrapping my head around a potential use case for this.
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
Re: Increase: Banking API
#33How is this different than Column Stripe Treasury Treasury Prime Unit Cross River Bank Any BaaS I'm missing? ???
My alma mater Moov Financial [0]. They also have a bunch of neat OSS libraries on GitHub [1].
[0] https://moov.io
Re: Increase: Banking API
#34I 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.
Re: Increase: Banking API
#35> 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.?
Re: Increase: Banking API
#36Is 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.
Re: Increase: Banking API
#37It 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?
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, an…
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"
}'
Re: Increase: Banking API
#38Re: Increase: Banking API
#39Thanks @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 soun…
heya! i'm casually interested in the space, and also have been tracking Column (https://column.com/)
to a distant observer, you look similar, but i'm sure there are real differences between you, so I'd love something like a "top 3 things to note" about Increase vs Column, in a least-getting-you-in-trouble way as possible - its hard to compare because i dont know what I don't know.
Re: Increase: Banking API
#40I 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?
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 [1] https://www.sofi.com/press/sofi-to-acquire-galileo