Payment speeds are increasing amid banks’ wider use of real-time networks like FedNow and The Clearing House’s RTP. But such payments aren’t yet standard in consumer use cases.

That’s changing, however, as financial technology startups move into the payments industry and seek more nimble solutions, said Darragh Buckley, the founder and CEO of Increase, which provides banking services via API connections.

Buckley says he was Stripe’s first hire in 2010, shortly after siblings John and Patrick Collison co-founded the payments company, leaving six years later to pursue his own fintech ambitions. In 2020, he founded Increase, which offers companies software for tasks such as bill payment, payroll and loan servicing.

Increase customers include New York-based Ramp, the financial-management software company, Stripe and Gusto, a San Francisco human resources software firm.

So far, Buckley has self-funded the company, which has 30 employees and is based in Bend, Oregon. He declined to reveal the size of his investment.

Buckley is a native of Limerick, Ireland, and knew the Collison brothers when the three were growing up in the area. He said he and Patrick Collison reconnected when both were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.  

PAYMENTS DIVE: What was your role at Stripe?

DARRAGH BUCKLEY: My role was building out the team responsible for our programmatic interactions with financial partners, initially our U.S. banking partners, as well as the card brands, integrating with Visa and Mastercard. Stripe never built disbursements to merchants by wire: You receive a chunk of change from the credit card network, you need to push it out to folks, and Stripe never did that by wire. Wires are at Stripe-scale, fast, ubiquitous, cheap, but Stripe didn’t build a product there because of how wires would fail. 

When we were building on top of Wells Fargo, we’d receive an email that said ‘Heads up, we weren’t able to deliver this wire.’ And it’s just hard to build products that you're proud of (that sit) on top of manual email flows like that. No fault on Wells Fargo, it was just built for a different kind of user. Our networks in the U.S. are very good, reliable, ubiquitous. We just need to do a better job of exposing the last mile of those.

What’s top of mind as you think about Increase’s growth and where U.S. banking infrastructure is headed?

The underlying U.S. financial technology is good. We are missing the last mile delivery of that. We can do a better job exposing Fed ACH, Fedwire and FedNow more widely to others. And I think that is surprising to many folks. If I was to ask you how your experience is with RTP or FedNow, you’d probably shrug at me and say, ‘Wait, what?’ We do not need to build a new network. We should do a better job with it.

So why is it we don’t see more real-time payment use at the consumer level?

Payment network curves just take time. Apple Pay is now a great business for Apple, but when you look at the start of the (growth) curves, it looks pretty uninteresting. One of the reasons Google has never succeeded (in payments) is they’ve never allowed the curve to play out long enough. They keep canceling projects before they get to interesting levels. 

Real-time payments volume wasn’t that great 18 months ago, and now it’s very real. Sure it’s not everywhere yet, but it’s more and more places all of the time and we’ll get there. 

What factors push adoption of real-time payments? 

In bill payment, it’s ‘Would you like to get paid by check, and we’ll put it in the mail, or would you like to get paid by real-time payments at some sort of discount?’ That drives volume towards real-time payments on payroll. Certainly, at an individual bank level, the incentives might be towards delay or high-value wire mechanisms instead of real-time payments, but all you need is some banks to introduce real-time payments for that competitive dynamic to rapidly move.

Give us your prediction on real-time payments becoming standard.

I would be surprised if it took 18 months. I’m always optimistic here.