@bentossell I'll let @bpmilne jump in on the first two, but as for your third question, Dwolla's platform is about providing access and power to developers. Today's underlying bank transfer system, called ACH, is great. It's low-cost, works with 99.9% of all bank accounts in the U.S., and moves over $40T annually, but ACH is also extremely hard to access—often requiring platforms to go to through banks (no #APIs) or platforms that constrains its use to certain use cases (e.g. pay-in with a card, payout with a bank transfer). The 40-year-old transfer system is also woefully ill-prepared to handle the unique requests/needs of today's digital platforms. Developers shouldn't have to piece-mail 4 or 5 different services to be able to obvious things, like hold balances, create a P2P platform, or do payouts. Dwolla's developer platform was designed to offer fast, simple, and seamless access to ACH. It's built to do things ACH couldn't do on its own.

@jslampe agreed that such a traditional business needs a real update and awesome to see that you are trying to solve this :)

@jslampe @bentossell So what other things can you get with this API? (can you view transactions of the user? - Given permission is given)

@bentossell - "tell us the story behind Dwolla :)" Dwolla's been around for a while but was originally launched in 2010 as a way for e-commerce merchants to accept payment without paying interchange fees. Adding a bank has always been central to the experience and now that we're rolling out new white label ACH API (https://www.dwolla.com/white-label), we wanted bank authorization to be as easy as humanly possible for any third party app and for the team developing it as it is on Dwolla.com. I don't think it's lost on anyone that whether you charge a credit card, debit card, send a wire transfer, or an ach transfer, money is moving between 2 bank accounts. We've always focused on making that as easy as possible while saving our members from costly transaction fees. Focusing on bank transfers has really helped us specialize in that. "Obviously this touches on sensitive information, how do you plan on getting and keeping users trust?" Our technical and infosec teams that manage this for the core Dwolla.com services are handling data management and best practices. I'll ask them to get something up that's more detailed. "What are the biggest issues you find that you feel Dwolla is here to solve?" Saving everyone time and money (2.5%+ to charge a card, 0% to use Dwolla) is something that we generally feel puts a lot of money back into everyone's pockets. While Dwolla doesn't sell authorization services we do think this is an important part of making money transfer easy in the US and Dwolla.js makes integrating that functionality much easier.

@aaran_mcguire @bentossell Once a customer bank account has been verified, it can then be used to initiate the transfer of funds using the /transfers endpoint in Dwolla's API (https://docsv2.dwolla.com/#trans...). These transfers can be to other customers within the White Label account's list of customers or to the White Label account itself.

@tommyrva - I think of it this way. Our network is still behind our platform and white label customers can pick and choose how they want to use the technology. Our white label customers may not all take full advantage of our network and they may simply want ACH to ACH transfers between bank accounts. Other customers, have an entire balance infrastructure and member to member payments that's driven entirely by our network. Here are 2 examples. 1. A company building an entirely new mobile wallet. It has it's own products, and users. It needs a way to load/unload the wallets and a way to actually maintain balances behind the scenes without all of the technical headache of starting from scratch. They're using our network to manage all of this and our software platform to manage transactions. The 2 get tied together as part of the white label package that solves the problem they want to solve. 2. A company that needs to pull in payments 5-10 times per month from hundreds of people and then disperse those payments, take their cut, and send the funds directly to another party. They probably don't ever want to use Dwolla's network to hold funds somewhere, but they'll use our software platform to manage the funds flow between bank accounts. What we find is that how this all gets wrapped up into our customers final app just depends on what product they want to provide. More often than not our benefit is that we help our early stage customers get to market faster, at a much lower cost than building it themselves. In our later stage customers we're helping them solve operational inefficiencies. There are a lot of potential applications but these are things we're seeing a lot of. In any of these scenarios. Anytime you need to authorize a bank account it's good to be able to do it quickly without eating engineering resources up for months!

@bpmilne I think that's fantastic. Amazing complexity to this stuff that folks don't understand, probably 5x more complicated than the card payment infrastructure. Huge opportunity with very few if any existing options for folks building tech that requires it.

@aaran_mcguire Bank credentials are provided through the Dwolla hosted IAV experience to our technology provider. This offloads the risk of capturing sensitive bank information for applications building on Dwolla's White Label API, where we require bank verification before we'll move funds from the account.

@yozapli There absolutely are opportunities for startups, please email bizdev@dwolla.com and they can help you out! Thanks!

@yozapli We do hear a lot from startups and we love working with companies to get off the ground. What features that are provided in a ~$2,5K a month package would include a lot of services that would likely save 6+ months of development/legal time for a company getting off the ground. In same cases probably more... To get Dwolla started it took me 2+ years just to find the first bank to work with! I'm just making the assumption someone else could do it in a lot less time than I did when I say 6 months.

@arush - The biggest difference is that this is not a standalone auth service that Dwolla sells. Dwolla.js is designed to make authorization easy for the purpose of transferring money as a part of Dwolla's white label product. - https://www.dwolla.com/white-label For those using our white label services Dwolla.js makes authorization very simple.