Dwolla today introduced a white label service that allows financial institutions to use its FiSync “pipe” for its own faster payments service.
Dwolla is also white-labeling an ACH application.
The white label offerings allow financial institutions to present a payments API to their clients, with the FI’s “look, feel, and name on end-user interactions” of its brand.
Ben Milne, the founder of Dwolla, told Bank Innovation yesterday that the company found that this brand demand was a dealbreaker for some financial institutions, “so we realized that we should just provide it.” Dwolla is offering the white label ACH service to businesses, as well as to banks.
The white label services represent a significant step forward for Dwolla’s transformation into a B2B venture. Clearly, white label is a significant new channel for Dwolla to leverage its payments prowess, including the FiSync payments “pipe” which took Dwolla around three years to build. (Milne said just securing the financial institution to clear payments through FiSync took around a year.) But, beyond that, FiSync really becomes a payments “pipe” now. If Stripe provides the payments API for startups, Dwolla can now be said to provide the payments API for financial institutions. We’ll let you guess whether startups or financial institutions generate more payment transaction volume.
Meanwhile, the ACH offering from Dwolla effectively competes with other ACH-as-a-service providers, like Stripe. According to Dwolla, its offering is more “accessible/flexible,” and seemingly less expensive.
Pricing for Dwolla’s white label services are flat — not transaction-based. That, in and of itself, is somewhat remarkable, considering that the vast majority of payments pricing is transaction-driven. For Milne, the pricing comports with Dwolla’s overarching goal, which he insists remains true today:
“We are trying to make things better,” he said.
This is the first of two articles on Dwolla. Read more about CEO Ben Milne’s thoughts on faster payments and fintech in Part 2, here.