Today I'm talking with Darragh Buckley, the CEO and co-founder of Increase. If you've been following fintech for a while, you probably know Darragh as employee number one at Stripe, where he built the team responsible for moving money at a massive scale. At Stripe, he learned a crucial lesson about infrastructure: when you're stuck solving business, technical, and risk problems all at once, you need to drop down a layer. That insight led to Increase, which does something quite novel, instead of connecting to banks one by one, they connect directly to the Federal Reserve itself, operating their own banking core that exposes all this functionality through APIs. With a team of less than 20 people, they're now processing over $100 billion annually.

In this conversation, we dig into the lessons Darragh learned scaling Stripe, why he believes compliance and accounting should be built into engineering from day one rather than bolted on later, his vision for a future where community banks serve specific communities like dentists or families managing elderly parents' finances, and why he's personally investing in community banks across the Pacific Northwest. We also get into real-time payments infrastructure, including a great story about buying a car on a Saturday. Now let's get on with the show.

In the podcast, you will learn:

• How Increase was born out of early challenges at Stripe.
• What he learned about scaling fintech companies at Stripe.
• The advantage of dropping down a layer when building fintech infrastructure.
• How Increase is able to connect directly to the Federal Reserve.
• The concept of a side core and how it integrates with banking cores.
• The different types of companies they work with.
• A fun story about paying a car dealer with a real time payment on a Saturday.
• The scale that Increase is at today.
• Why they decided that now is the time to spread with word about Increase.
• Why it matters to build compliance into your product very early.
• What lessons compliance can learn from software engineering.
• How they are managing real time risk.
• Why Darragh has personally invested in several community banks.
• What will have changed in financial services if Increase is successful.

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Today's guest is Jason Lee, a fintech veteran who has been at the forefront of employee financial wellness innovation for nearly a decade. After co-founding and scaling DailyPay into one of the pioneering companies in earned wage access, Jason went on to launch Salt Labs, an innovative employee rewards platform that Chime acquired just 18 months after its founding. Now, as the leader of Chime Enterprise, Jason is on a mission to make financial health benefits as ubiquitous in the workplace as health insurance.

In this conversation, we explore why he believes every employer will eventually offer these programs, not out of altruism, but because it makes compelling business sense. Jason shares fascinating insights about how financial stress undermines productivity, why employees value Salt's non-dollar rewards even more than cash, and his ambitious vision for building an employer-focused financial health platform that could parallel what Fidelity achieved in retirement. It's a conversation about the intersection of fintech, HR technology, and the future of work – and why the employer may be the most powerful catalyst for improving Americans' financial lives.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Jason’s high profile background in fintech.
• The origins of Salt Labs and how they became part of Chime.
• The premise for Chime Workplace.
• Why they are fundamentally in the productivity business.
• How they are able to measure financial wellness outcomes.
• Why employers are caring more about the financial health of their employees today.
• Jason’s prediction for employers and financial wellness.
• The target market for Chime Workplace.
• What they hear when they first go into a new employer.
• Why they don’t charge employers for Chime Workplace.
• How their SALT rewards work.
• Jason's vision for the future of employer-driven financial wellness.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Today I'm delighted to be joined by Clive Kinross, CEO and co-founder of Propel Holdings. Propel is one of the most successful fintech lenders serving underbanked consumers, and what makes their story particularly compelling is how they've achieved it: profitably, almost from day one.

Since founding the company 14 years ago with just $4 million in capital, Clive and his three co-founders, who are all still with the company, have built a business that now serves a market of 100 million consumers across the US, Canada, and the UK. The company went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2021 and has been the best-performing stock in its vintage.

In our conversation, Clive shares how his background as a chartered accountant shaped his disciplined, unit economics-focused approach to building a lending business, how Propel uses AI to analyze over 80,000 applications daily and make credit decisions in six seconds, and why he believes the opportunity to serve underbanked consumers in developed economies has never been stronger.

In this podcast you will learn:

• Why Clive decided to tackle credit for his second major business.
• How the company has evolved since its founding 14 years ago.
• The different brands they have in the US, Canada and UK markets.
• How their credit graduation programs work.
• The typical consumer coming to Propel for credit.
• How they differentiate themselves from others in the market.
• How their AI models work and the data they are feeding into these models.
• How Clive views the potential of AI throughout Propel’s business.
• Why he decided to take Propel public in 2021.
• How they were able to become a profitable fintech lender quickly and sustainably.
• What Clive is most excited about for the future of Propel.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes