Two-year-old, Silicon Prairie (Des Moines, Iowa)-based mobile payment startup Dwolla has gone from zero to $1 million per day in transactions.
"Dwolla's price point and innovations in the social and mobile payments space helped us to bust out onto the scene and grow organically," says chief executive Ben Milne. "Dwolla's network has demonstrated that physical cash can have a digital future, but now it's time to push the envelope and begin releasing the technologies, announcing the partnerships, and connecting the dots we see as the future of payments."
Dwolla integrates with social networks Twitter and Facebook to allow users to send and receive funds from their social media pages. Dwolla also offers banks an integration service called FiSync, provided through a technology partnership with The Members Group, that lets them provide direct cash transfers from bank accounts, without the need for a pre-loaded Dwolla account. To date, 15 banks have signed up for FiSync.
Dwolla transactions fees are capped at 25 cents per transaction.
"We've been conscientiously blowing up the old payment models to discover the insights that are enabling us to craft a new payment network based on the possibilities of tomorrow's technology, not 1970s antiquities," says Milne. "We're not engrained in the limitations of yesterday and that provides our network with a distinct advantage to create a network that caters to the new API technologies that will drive the payments market."
