ISO 8583 is the standard for real-time messages communicated between acquirers and issuers through all of the major card networks. Whenever you tap your card at a point of sale device or click “purchase” online, odds are it will eventually end up as an ISO 8583 message sent between the merchant’s acquiring processor, the card network, and your bank’s issuer processor.

Increase operates as a parallel core for our bank partners. We connect directly to the Federal Reserve and process wires, ACH transfers, and checks using a dedicated routing number. An important associated responsibility is to reconcile the activity in our systems with the cash movement at the Federal Reserve.

In 2012, Stripe had an incident where a file sent to a financial partner wasn’t acknowledged. This went unnoticed, leading to a delay in transferring what seemed like a significant amount of money at the time. During the debrief, it became clear that we needed more robust automated monitoring and alerting for our financial partner integrations. In the next day or so, Patrick and Siddarth built an invariant monitor.

From the Fresno drop in 1958 and through Visa’s first 15 years of existence, an authorization with a Visa card was processed by having the merchant call either the cardholder’s bank, if the card was regional, or a switching center to be forwarded onto the bank if it was not. In the early 70s, the overhead of this reached a breaking point and Visa set out to build what would become known as “BankAmericard Authorization System Experimental (BASE)”—an electronic authorization system linking the Visa member banks with merchants or their acquiring centers through a central switching system.

A financial institution can maintain its existing core while simultaneously adding a new core. The two cores can interact as necessary (either by exchanging data directly or separately interacting with upstream or downstream services). This is what Increase does: we operate as a parallel core for our bank partners. We also expose functionality of the underlying depository rails via powerful APIs.

Increase’s API and Dashboard allow efficient, programmatic access to mail checks, deposit check images, and — starting this month — host a virtual mailbox to accept payments in your designated check lockbox.

This post explains one of the core design principle of Increase’s API, dubbed No Abstractions, which we’ve found useful as our product and company scale.

CapitalOS offers embedded spend management solutions for B2B platforms looking to launch card-based products for their users. As B2B platforms increasingly become the operating system for small businesses, they’re uniquely positioned to save time and money for their users through smart spend management.

Increase and our bank partners now offer access to Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) coverage on deposits of more than $250,000. This works through our connection to a deposit placement network offered by IntraFi. You can place deposits using IntraFi’s ICS service via Increase’s Dashboard or API. Enrollment does not impact access to your funds.

We first wrote an internal culture document at Increase on 2019-10-09. It was labeled as a draft since we weren’t sure what principles would hold true as we scaled. Now, 4 years later, we’ve found the way that we work allows us to process tens of billions in payments.

Ramp is the ultimate platform for modern finance teams. From spend management and expense management software, to bill payments and vendor management, Ramp’s all-in-one solution is designed to automate finance operations and build healthier businesses.