(Left, Ben Milne of Dwolla at Cornstalks Demo Night, photo by Danny Schreiber.)
This is the third post in an eight-post series recapping the demonstrations that took place at Thursday’s Cornstalks Demo Night. To learn more about the event, see our post, “Cornstalks ‘Demo Night’ happening next Thursday, March 31.”
Ben Milne presented Dwolla, a free, web-based software platform that allows users to send, receive and request funds from others users — all at a flat rate of 25 cents per transaction.
Surrounded by an industry — credit and plastic cards — that Milne said generates $45 billion in annual fees for U.S. consumers, Dwolla circumvents the traditional payment avenues, which are littered with fees. Said Milne: “It’s like PayPal without the fees.”
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A few highlights from Milne’s presentation:
- He highlighted Spots, a geo-location feature recently added to Dwolla. Spots enables users, with their mobile devices, to locate and pay other users that accept Dwolla. There are about 1,000 Dwolla spots across the country, and Milne’s unabashedly bullish on the technology. “Geo location, not NFC and not a million other things, (is) really what’s going to drive things in the future,” Milne said.
- Milne touted several unique aspects of Dwolla’s interface. It allows users — much like in Gmail, he said — to search for past financial transactions by name rather than have to scroll through pages upon pages to find them. The platform also allows for integration with social networks. “We pull in social connections and curate them as contacts,” Milne said, “and allow you to send or receive money and request money through those social networks.”
- Milne illustrated Dwolla’s usefulness for trading platforms — including energy, stocks and currency. To that end, Milne said Dwolla has talked with a company that does 500 million transactions per month. Even at the low price of 25 cents apiece, 500 million transactions per month “could be really good for us,” Milne deadpanned.
- Milne closed with a look toward the future. “We believe at the end of the day physical cash will probably go away,” he said. “Where’s the market going to be in 10 years? We think it’s going to be in your pocket, and we think it’s going to be a cell phone and we want to be a front-runner.”
For Milne’s complete presentation, view the video below.
