Dwolla integration

by | Oct 21, 2016 | System Integration

Dwolla logo

We are excited to announce our brand new integration with Dwolla!

Lots of traditional credit card payment gateways have added support for ACH over the years. These APIs lowered the barrier of entry for merchants to accept bank to bank transfers. Unfortunately, virtually all implementations offer transfer times of at least 3 to 4 days.

Introducing Dwolla: the company has built over the years a robust infrastructure specifically designed to offer a more modern way to access and leverage the ACH transfer network. The result reduces the transaction time down to as little one day and provides the building blocks for all sorts of integrations, business models, payment flows and end-user experiences (your users don’t even need a Dwolla account). You can trigger a payment by having your customers authenticate into their online banking account, recurring, variable payments for subscriptions are supported through On-Demand Transfers and you can even trigger payouts if you are a marketplace.

Building this integration had been on our radar for a very long time, but we just never had the time to focus on it. Luckily, once again, the community helped. A consulting firm from Argentina took on the task, and they did a terrific job implementing a full solution!

This new plugin supports both Dwolla Direct (co-branded product, easier to setup), as well as Dwolla White Label (for deeper, seamless experiences within your own native applications). Funding sources can be verified through both IAV (Instant Account Verification) and Micro-deposit verifications, and Dwolla makes sure that no sensitive payment information hits your servers. You can even configure it to listen to webhooks, to get real-time notifications of the deposits status. Integration can take as little as a week and the price point (SaaS) is legendarily more cost-effective than standing up and maintaining the functionality that a Dwolla integration provides.

They also created a small demo showing how you can integrate Kill Bill with Dwolla on your checkout page.

This integration is a standard payment plugin, which means all you need to do to get started is to install and configure the plugin. Once it is picked-up by Kill Bill, it will be available through the standard 1.0 payment APIs, with no modification required from the clients. The analytics plugin will also seamlessly update financial reports with Dwolla transactions as soon as they are triggered.

Big thanks to the Dwolla team, who helped us clarify specific integration points, such as how to best handle OAuth tokens for future payments as well as how to be compliant for On-Demand Transfers.

If you are attending Money20/20 this year, I suggest you go listen to Ben Milne, Founder & CEO of Dwolla, as he will touch on Open Bank APIs: it’s because of these types of open APIs that a project like Kill Bill can exist!

Related Articles