Dwolla on Tuesday rolled out Facilitator, which enables developers to seamlessly keep part of Dwolla transactions for themselves. Screenshot courtesy of Dwolla.
On the heels of last week’s unveiling of Proxi, which generated ample media buzz and a flood of beta users, Dwolla on Tuesday announced two new tools designed to enhance the experience for developers working with its API, rolling out Facilitator and an off-site gateway.
“One of the big things we’ve gotta keep concentrating on is how do we get Dwolla transaction flow into more software platforms, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with Facilitator and with the off-site gateway,” Ben Milne, the founder and CEO of the Des Moines-based mobile payment platform, said Tuesday in a phone interview. “We’re basically just asking the developers, ‘What do you want to see from us in order to make it easier for you to do this?’ “
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Milne expressed the most excitement over the possibilities presented by Facilitator, which enables developers to set up a piece of software that incorporates Dwolla and keep a part of the transaction for themselves. “Whether it’s a service fee for your platform or you’re pitching an integration that includes 2-3 cents on top of every transaction that goes through your module,” Dwolla’s blog says, “you can now get paid!”
Milne said Facilitator uses a “model for developers that we haven’t seen before, and we’re really interested to see what some of them do with it.”
Dwolla’s off-site payment gateway (left, screenshot courtesy of Dwolla), which was driven by requests for the Active Merchant platform, allows an online business to tie into the Dwolla API in a fashion similar to the PayPal Express Checkout flow. During the checkout process, a customer jumps to Dwolla’s website, finalizes an order, and then moves back to the merchant site, where all of the order information is neatly tied up.
“There’s quite a few pretty large merchants that utilize (Active Merchant) who have been kind of guiding us into it, which was you could say a little bit of a prerequisite for them utilizing Dwolla,” Milne said. “So we kind of went out, did the legwork for it, got it up and running with their guidance.”
Meanwhile, after last week’s Proxi announcement, Dwolla is pushing forward with beta testing. Beta was full, Milne said “in about 40 minutes,” with users from all over the country, including about 60 percent in Des Moines. Instructions will go out to beta users by week’s end, and Milne said Dwolla is working hard to make sure that the timing for getting Proxi into the app store “is as minimal as possible.”
“I think that there are additional logical steps from here built around geofencing and additional accuracy,” Milne said of Proxi, “and I think we’ll probably learn a lot the first couple months Proxi is out of beta and out into the world.”
