DB

Darragh Buckley

Things Darragh Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Darragh Buckley has been a guest on Barefoot Innovation Podcast and The Peel with Turner Novak .

Recently: “Why Stripe’s 1st Employee Bought a Bank | Darragh Buckley, Increase” on The Peel with Turner Novak (October 2026); “Community Banks: Darragh Buckley on a Tech-Enabled Future” on Barefoot Innovation Podcast (April 2024).

What They Said

“If you're able to tell me how to properly solve the identity problem, I'll be able to tell you how to solve the fraud problem… we haven't correctly solved like online identity… to like reasonable levels of confidence. But like, you know, that's the fundamental problem of fraud payments is identity.” — Darragh Buckley, The Peel with Turner Novak

Asked why fraud has been so hard to solve in payments, the Stripe veteran and bank founder says it comes down to identity: payments fraud is someone pretending to be someone else, and the internet still can't verify who anyone is with enough confidence.

The Peel with Turner Novak · 2026-10-15 Permalink → Listen →
The Peel with Turner Novak Around 57:22 into the episode
Darragh Buckley

Yeah. And in very unfortunate ways, right? And there's many things that we can do as an industry to reduce that.

Speaker 3

Like, why has it been so hard to solve the fraud problem?

Darragh Buckley

If you're able to tell me how to properly solve the identity problem, I'll be able to tell you how to solve the fraud problem. And I'm not meaning to unfairly throw it back at you. I'm just saying that like we haven't correctly solved like online identity with various versions of it to like reasonable levels of confidence. But like, you know, that's the fundamental problem of fraud payments is identity. Because you're

Speaker 4

like pretending to be someone else,

Darragh Buckley

really, at

Speaker 3

the end of the

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Imagine if your friend is an air traffic controller and they show up to meet for you to coffee and they're saying like, I've had the most exciting day at work. You'd be like, no, I don't want excitement from my air traffic controllers… I think you want the same from your banker. I think you want your banker to, in fact, enjoy uneventful days.” — Darragh Buckley, The Peel with Turner Novak

Stripe's first employee, who now runs a bank, on why he prefers boring, proven technology and an uneventful temperament in banking. Engineers can get their fill of hard puzzles from the Sunday crossword, he says, rather than leaving their team a complicated system to maintain for years.

The Peel with Turner Novak · 2026-10-15 Permalink → Listen →
The Peel with Turner Novak Around 1:10:53 into the episode
Speaker 4

it's almost like there's sometimes some like the glamorous of building and trying some new hard thing. There's like more social status internally, like you get more joy from like, I figured out this really complicated thing versus like sometimes it's the beauty of the simplicity of like not

Speaker 3

actually complicating it.

Darragh Buckley

Don't get me wrong. I can admire arduous intellectual pursuits, right? It's okay that those, you know, but we can, we can do that by answering the hard crossword on a Sunday, not by obligating our team to maintain a thing for years, right? Like choosing the uneventful thing. And I especially think this is true in banking, right? Like if imagine if your friend is an air traffic controller and they show up to meet for you to coffee and they're saying like, I've had the most exciting day at work. You'd be like, no, I don't want excitement from my air traffic controllers, right? Like it's so boring. Nothing happens. I will make the statement. I think you want the same from your banker. I think you want your banker to have an uneventful day. I think you want your banker to, in fact, enjoy uneventful days. There to be a quiet satisfaction of that, you know, reliability, regularly getting the things done as expected. Yeah, I think that personality works well in banking.

Speaker 4

Yeah, because when I think about what are the biggest events in banking, like they're generally not something that you want to see happening

Speaker 3

on a daily basis.

Darragh Buckley

Indeed. So, yeah. Interesting, huh? Yeah. Yeah. In much the same way that, you know, the kind of underlying utilities of society, electricity or water, et cetera, like it's okay that these things are uneventful. It's in fact good that they're uneventful. Yeah.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

Collections They Appear In

Startups & Venture