community-banks
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Neal Wilson and the fine print that moves money
Raised in a family of schoolteachers, Neal Wilson found his way into finance through securities law. At EJF Capital, he has spent two decades studying how a change in the rules can change who gets the capital.
Keith Floen Has Spent Four Decades Keeping the Bank’s Name on the Card
Long before fintech learned to speak fluent API, Keith Floen was asking a stubbornly human question: does a card program make a bank’s customer relationship stronger? His career is a quiet history of how that question survived four decades of new technology.
Arcady Lapiro’s Second Act Is a Box of Banking Legos
After helping build a European digital bank through the dot-com bust and 9/11, the French-born founder is trying to give community banks a way around the software they cannot afford to replace.
Brent Jackson Put the Corporate Card Inside the Bank
He began with a better card for small businesses. Then customer conversations led Torpago toward a quieter, more consequential job: helping banks issue modern cards under their own names.
Darragh Buckley
Darragh Buckley is the founder and CEO of Increase, an enterprise-grade banking API company that lets technology businesses programmatically store, move, and reconcile money by connecting directly into the Federal Reserve's payment rails. He was Stripe's first employee, joining the Collison brothers - fellow natives of Limerick, Ireland - in 2010 to build the banking and money-movement foundations of the company. After leaving Stripe in 2016, he founded Increase (YC Summer 2020), which now processes well over $100 billion a year with a famously tiny team. A contrarian who believes in the staying power of community banks, he has personally acquired stakes in small Washington-state banks, including a 10%-plus position in Twin City Bank that triggered Federal Reserve disclosure.
Margaret Hartigan
Margaret Hartigan is the founder and CEO of Marstone, a Providence-based digital wealth management platform that banks and financial institutions white-label to deliver investing and planning tools to clients of all means. A former top-quintile Merrill Lynch financial advisor, she launched Marstone in 2013 to demystify and humanize finance, raised a Series B in 2024, and was named Innovator of the Year at the 2025 US Fintech Awards.