Tekion, Increase and Core Bank announced Tekion Spend embedded banking on September 23, 2026. It builds banking directly into the Tekion Automotive Retail Cloud, the dealer management platform used by more than 2,000 dealerships. The product gives a dealership an FDIC-insured bank account inside the software it already uses to run sales, service and finance. Core Bank holds the deposits, and Increase supplies the account and payments technology. It is available to US dealerships on the platform from the fourth quarter.

The companies later reissued the announcement as a corrected version, citing multiple revisions without saying what changed. The substance described here comes from the corrected release.

The Problem Tekion Spend Embedded Banking Targets

A single dealership makes hundreds of thousands of payments a year to suppliers, vendors and customers, according to the release. That money usually moves through a bank account outside the dealer management system. Staff print checks, track them by hand and reconcile everything against the books at month end.

Tekion Spend embedded banking moves that account inside the platform. Dealerships can open FDIC-insured accounts in their own names and earn interest on deposits. They can send payments over any US rail with real-time tracking, and manage accounts across several locations. A payment, an invoice and the ledger entry become one record instead of three systems matched up later.

Jamie Fox, general manager of fintech at Tekion, said it “sees the invoice, the payment, and the ledger entry as one object.” That claim will be easy to test once dealerships are running on Tekion Spend embedded banking in the fourth quarter.

Tekion Already Has a Fintech Business

Tekion Spend is not the first time Tekion has put money movement inside its platform. The company has a general manager of fintech. In June 2026, it partnered with Brex to embed corporate cards and spend management in the same Automotive Retail Cloud.

The two products cover different ground. Brex handles card spend, with controls by rooftop, department or user, and aims to replace some paper checks with card payments. It maps each card transaction to the matching record in the platform. Tekion Spend embedded banking handles the operating account and payments behind accounts payable. Together they show Tekion building a financial stack around the dealer management system rather than testing one feature.

The roadmap confirms that. The release lists the next targets. Tekion plans to extend Tekion Spend embedded banking to floorplan financing, service, sales, finance and insurance transactions, and payroll.

Why Increase Is the Interesting Part

Increase is the infrastructure layer underneath. On July 29, 2026, it launched its own FDIC-member bank, Increase Bank. According to the corrected release, Coast, Gusto and Ramp are among the companies using Increase technology. Together its clients process more than $500 billion a year in payments, card transactions and loans.

Here, though, the deposits sit at Core Bank, not Increase Bank. Increase is acting as a technology provider to another bank. So its infrastructure business and its new bank look set to run side by side. Not every Increase client will move deposits onto the Increase balance sheet.

Speed is part of the pitch. Jack Flintermann Reed, head of product at Increase, said Tekion built a working prototype on Increase APIs in under three weeks. For vertical software companies weighing a product like Tekion Spend embedded banking, that build time matters as much as the banking license behind it.

Who Holds the Relationship

The release is explicit that Tekion is not a bank. Core Bank, Member FDIC, provides the banking services, and Increase provides the technology. That line defines who holds the regulatory relationship with a dealership. It also defines who answers if something goes wrong with deposits or payments.

Core Bank frames its role around trust. Lindsay Borgeson, president of its Core X unit, said the partnership gives dealerships the confidence of holding funds at a regulated institution. These three-party setups are becoming common. Software companies now stack on sponsor banks and infrastructure providers. More hands touch a customer’s money, even as the experience gets simpler. That makes the division of responsibility for compliance, fraud and customer complaints the detail dealerships should read most carefully.

Automotive retail is also a contested market for embedded finance. Payment companies already target dealerships directly. Priority Commerce, for example, bought the assets of Dealer Merchant Services in 2025. It now runs Priority Commerce Automotive, as FintechBits noted in its coverage of Priority.

What to Watch

As of September 28, Tekion Spend embedded banking had not gone live, since the fourth quarter starts on October 1. Neither Tekion nor Increase has disclosed how many dealerships have signed up.

Adoption will validate the deal. The key figure is how many of the 2,000-plus dealerships on the platform take up Tekion Spend embedded banking after launch. An unused banking feature is a very different story from operators moving their payables off paper checks. The next milestones are the first live dealerships and any move into floorplan financing, where far more money is involved.

For related coverage, see why CSI bought Qolo to extend its payments stack for community banks.

FintechBits covers payments, banking and fintech developments for readers in the US and UK. This article is for information only and is not financial advice. Views expressed are those of the FintechBits editorial team.