Increase has built our infrastructure with direct connections to the financial networks because the companies building on top of us want speed, control, flexibility, and transparency. We connect to the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House and Visa as a direct participant, rather than routing through intermediaries. Connecting directly to the lowest level possible is how we’re able to design and build our product with No Abstractions.
This article outlines how our direct-to-rail connections work, and why they matter.
Building direct-to-rail infrastructure
Increase operates as a parallel core for our banking partners. We maintain the software and infrastructure that connect directly to the Federal Reserve (FedACH, Fedwire, FedNow, Check21), The Clearing House for Real-Time Payments, and Visa for card issuing and push-to-card.
When you originate a payment instruction through Increase’s APIs, there is no intermediary processing layer between our systems and the Federal Reserve. The submission goes directly from our infrastructure to the Fed’s. The acknowledgment, settlement confirmation, or return comes directly back.
Why direct-to-rail connections matter
Access to every ACH processing window. Because we connect directly to FedACH, we make every same-day and future-dated ACH window available. This gives you more flexibility and granular control over when you originate ACH debits to fund your account(s), how long funds sit, and when you originate ACH credits to push funds back out. This level of specificity is particularly useful for bill pay, payroll and accounts receivable use cases.
Network details at your fingertips. Direct connections mean that network-level data is available via API. Trade identifiers, including ACH trace numbers and Input/Output Message Accountability Data (IMAD/OMAD) for wires, are surfaced to you automatically in API responses and webhooks. Your support team doesn’t need to open a ticket to retrieve them. If a transfer is returned, we receive the return file directly from the Fed, parse the network message, correlate it to the original transfer, and expose the return reason code without transformation. This allows you to handle exceptions through code, rather than staffing teams of operators to manually triage them.
Observable network events. Increase passes you network events at each milestone: when a transfer is submitted to the network, when it’s acknowledged by the network, and it’s when expected to settle with the recipient bank. Payment status reflects actual network responses, letting you surface to your customers exactly where their money is, every step of the way. We also surface in real-time every file we send to the network to make sure everything is working as expected.
Reconciliation, down to the penny. While banks are responsible for ledgering customer activity, the Federal Reserve is the source of truth on where dollars actually sit. Each day, Increase compares reports provided by the Federal Reserve against our independently generated expectations of those reports to confirm alignment. We run continuous alerts that monitor this process and flag discrepancies the moment they appear. For our banking partners and fintech customers, this means that the balance they see in Increase reflects the Federal Reserve’s own accounting, not an approximation of it.
What this means for companies building on Increase
Ambitious financial technology companies don’t want an abstraction of the financial system. They come to us because of our direct network connections and the depth of integration that lets them build.
Because there are no intermediaries between Increase and the networks, there are no abstractions forced on you. You get to access data directly from the financial network. The windows you operate in are the windows the Federal Reserve offers. The return codes you handle are the ones the network actually sent. Nothing is abstracted away, estimated, or held behind an intermediary layer.
This allows companies building on Increase to launch and scale with speed, precision and control.
Increase connects directly to the Federal Reserve, FedACH, Fedwire, FedNow, and Visa, with no intermediary in the middle. Explore the API at increase.com/documentation.