In the latest of what has been a busy few weeks for Des Moines-based Dwolla, the company announced today that their cash money-transfer service is now available across the United States.
Additionally, they announced the online and mobile service (left, screenshot of Dwolla iPhone app from itunes.apple.com) has expanded to popular social networking platforms Facebook and Twitter.
“Dwolla is the first cash platform – since the dollar bill – that will allow consumers as well as organizations to significantly reduce the amount of fees they’re incurring for sending money electronically, while at the same time taking advantage of the social networks as a new medium for people to share funds,” said founder and CEO Ben Milne in Dwolla’s press release.
Through its integration with Facebook, Dwolla users can now share cash or pay for transactions with the more than 200 million other active U.S. Facebook users. Dwolla transfers cash, not credit, at a flat 25-cent transaction fee no matter the size of the transaction, which is a divergence for this industry where more established services like PayPal charge a percentage of the transaction for a fee. For example, PayPal’s standard rate for receiving payments for goods and services is 2.9 percent.
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Dwolla’s national launch comes exactly 12 months after they went live as an Iowa-only service. In our interview with Ben on December 1, 2009, he described their expansion strategy:
Right now we’re looking at two other states in the next four months. We have in-house projections and assumptions about the computing scale of the project which largely dictate how quickly we move forward. As we feel its safe and beneficial to expand…we will. We know the market is too big and too full of financial fraud for us to roll out everywhere over night. Controllable growth at the beginning is paramount to our success.
Dwolla held pretty close to that plan, first by expanding to California in February of this year and second by bringing on more established financial institutions – The Veridian Group & The Members Group – as its funding partners just a few weeks ago.
(Left: Milne, photo from facebook.com)
“One of the powerful benefits we were able to offer Ben is our national expertise in ACH processing and security. In vetting Dwolla during our month long stress and compliance testing, The Members Group took a hard and conservative stance toward the platform and we were thrilled when it passed with flying colors,” said Jeff Russell, executive vice president of The Members Group, in today’s release.
Here’s a quick video overview Dwolla recently released, titled “What is Dwolla?”
To learn about Dwolla’s beginnings, see our November 2009 interview with Milne: SPN interviews Ben Milne of Dwolla.
