Increase vs Block
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Banking infrastructure APIs with direct Federal Reserve and Visa connections for fintechs and neobanks; YC-backed offering ACH, RTP, and card issuance competing with Column and Unit in post-Synapse BaaS market.
About
Increase is a San Francisco-based banking infrastructure company providing direct-access banking APIs to technology companies — enabling fintechs, neobanks, payroll platforms, and embedded finance products to programmatically send and receive money through direct connections to the Federal Reserve (for same-day ACH and RTP), Visa (for card issuance), and other financial networks, without the intermediary bank complexity that most BaaS (Banking-as-a-Service) providers require. Founded in 2020 and a Y Combinator graduate, Increase serves technology companies across bill pay, payroll, digital wallets, embedded lending, and sponsor banking use cases.
San Francisco fintech (NYSE: SQ) added to S&P 500 July 2025; Cash App $5.0B gross profit, Square $3.7B, Afterpay BNPL integration, Jack Dorsey CEO competing with PayPal/Venmo and Stripe for merchant and consumer fintech.
About
Block, Inc. is a San Francisco, California-based financial technology company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: SQ) as an S&P 500 Information Technology component (added to the S&P 500 on July 23, 2025, replacing Hess Corporation) — operating two primary financial platforms: Square (merchant payment processing, point-of-sale hardware, and business banking for small-to-mid-size merchants) and Cash App (peer-to-peer payments, digital banking, stock investing, and Bitcoin transactions for individuals) alongside Afterpay (buy now pay later), Tidal (music streaming), and TBD (decentralized finance), through approximately 12,000 employees. CEO Jack Dorsey (co-founder with Jim McKelvey in 2009 as Square, rebranded to Block in December 2021) leads the company's strategy of building an interconnected ecosystem of financial services that connect individual consumers (Cash App) with merchants (Square) and the broader financial ecosystem. In fiscal year 2024, Block reported gross profit of approximately $8.9 billion, with Cash App generating approximately $5.0 billion in gross profit (+14% year-over-year) driven by Cash App Card, direct deposit adoption, and Cash App Pay, while Square generated approximately $3.7 billion in gross profit (+9%) driven by software and banking products alongside payment processing. Block acquired Afterpay for $29 billion in January 2022 — integrating the Australian buy-now-pay-later platform into both Square (merchant installment offer at checkout) and Cash App (consumer Afterpay integration).
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