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 your fintech products. Buckley is explicitly not doing that. He confirmed to TechCrunch that Twin City Bank will continue operating independently from Increase’s infrastructure.

“The risks observed in other BaaS partnerships” are the reason he’s keeping the two separate, according to his own characterization.

This is actually his third personal investment in a Washington state community bank. He also serves on the board of Washington Business Bank.

Twin City Bank, for its part, continues operating as a community-focused institution in Longview, Washington, without being converted into a fintech vehicle.

What this means for the broader BaaS landscape

Several players in the BaaS space have pursued direct bank ownership as a strategy for regulatory control and margin improvement. Owning the bank means owning the charter, which means fewer intermediaries and potentially fewer compliance headaches from a third-party sponsor bank relationship.

The FDIC non-objection and Federal Reserve disclosure process also signals that regulators are watching these arrangements closely. Any founder acquiring over 10% of a bank now faces a defined review process, and Buckley clearing that bar without incident is its own kind of signal about how Increase and its founder are perceived by the regulatory community.