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Ditch the Bank File Nightmares

Ramp processes $10B+ with Increase—find out how you can too.

Hey — It’s Yann.

Welcome to this new FinTex edition, the weekly FinTech news and trends for developers, helping you to build x10 better. This newsletter takes 5 minutes to read.

If you only have 30 seconds: Increase turns the Federal Reserve’s dusty ACH, Fedwire and RTP specs into a clean REST API. Ramp already pushes $10B+ a year through it. If you’re building payroll, wallets, bill-pay or anything that touches a bank account, you probably want to peek.

Let’s get into it.

 

FinTech Focus

Fed files, flat files, and Friday-night files

You probably know this scenario: add same-day ACH payouts to your lending app:

  • Generating NACHA files (in fixed-width, of course).

  • SFTP-ing them to the sponsor bank’s “secure” Windows server.

  • Waiting for the 3 pm Fed window…then praying returns reconcile.

Four hours of boilerplate later, you still couldn’t answer “Did the payment land?”. Multiply that by thousands of transfers, and you’re living in logging hell.

Every fintech team I know bangs into the same wall: legacy rails wrapped in legacy processes.

“Enterprise-grade banking APIs”

Think of Increase as Twilio for the Federal Reserve. Non-technical friend version: “It’s like a universal translator for bank payments—just tell it where to send money, and it handles all the old-school banking stuff for you.”

The magic: no hidden abstractions. Field names map 1-to-1 to the Fed specs, so when something breaks you debug with the docs in front of you, not a black box.

Under the hood they run a parallel core that connects directly to Fed lines plus Visa for cards. Customers (Ramp, Check, Pipe…) move billions per month across those pipes.

Key Information

🔧 Direct rails: FedACH, Fedwire, RTP, Visa issuing in one REST API.

🛡️ SOC 2 Type 2 + automated invariant monitoring baked into the platform.

Honest limitations

  • US-only rails. Need SEPA? Look elsewhere.

  • Bank partner footprint is small (Grasshopper + First Internet Bank). Great for tech hubs, tougher for niche programs.

The Bottom Line

Increase does one thing insanely well: expose the raw power of Fed rails without the 1980s baggage. At roughly $0.50-$2 per transaction, it pays for itself the moment you scrap your CSV/SFTP pipeline.

Bigger picture: we’re watching the “developer-core bank” thesis play out. Column bought a bank; Increase’s founder (ex-Stripe #1) just took a 10%+ stake in Twin City Bank to double-down on direct access. The walls between fintech apps and the Fed are thinning fast.

My take: If your roadmap includes real-time money movement, spin up a sandbox today. In the time it takes to microwave lunch, you’ll send your first Fed-native payment — and never touch a NACHA file again.

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