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Increase: Banking API

increase.com

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Re: Increase: Banking API

#61

Post by benjamindc »

pen2l wrote: post #59
benjamindc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, means a lot :)

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.

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.)

Re: Increase: Banking API

#62

Post by toomuchtodo »

chocolatkey wrote: post #32
sv123 wrote: post #8

Looks 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 sa…

Have you seen https://www.deel.com? Might be a solution for this problem.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#63

Post by bob1029 »

swyx wrote: post #44
zachthewf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ri…

> 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?

If you want to start an actual bank, you need a charter from the FDIC. This is commonly referred to as a De Novo bank. Also known as "virtually impossible".

Re: Increase: Banking API

#64

Post by Ozzie_osman »

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.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#65

Post by zhivota »

swyx wrote: post #44
zachthewf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ri…

Increase will have to partner with banks to provide the service, so you won't have to be an actual capitalized bank yourself, and you won't have to go find one. You can see in the fine print at the bottom of their page:

"Bank accounts and banking services are provided by Increase’s partner banks, members FDIC."

The only way they can provide all this functionality is to do all the hard work of integrating with whatever legacy junk the partner bank is running (along with all the Visa stuff, Stripe stuff, and whatever else they are using here). You could actually do this yourself, and some fintechs are attempting that, but it's very hard and expensive due to the PCI-DSS requirements, among other things.

I'll be curious to see if they will require their customers to have PCI-DSS or if they'll be able to tokenize everything in a way that doesn't require it. When I worked at Visa the big issue was that handling card data, even after tokenization, required PCI-DSS, which of course makes no sense, but the immune systems around the payments industry takes a long time to change.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#66

Post by sofixa »

rthomas6 wrote: post #60
Shindi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 t…

What you're describing sounds like what most people refer to as virtual cards. Three of my banks provide that for free, even though only two allow setting up a per-card limit.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#68

Post by zhivota »

dang wrote: post #9
randomcatuser wrote: post #2

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?)

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.

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.

Re: Increase: Banking API

#69

Post by sofixa »

bob1029 wrote: post #58

> 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 ab…

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.
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