Dwolla Rolls Out Real-Time B2B Payments

Payments platform Dwolla has debuted its real-time payments (RTP) option, which will allow for sending money directly to bank accounts, a press release emailed to PYMNTS said on Tuesday (April 6).

Dwolla CEO Brady Harris called the debut “game-changing,” saying it would be groundbreaking because of “how we collaborated with a forward-thinking financial institution to make real-time payments easily accessible to businesses of all sizes.”

“The immediacy of real-time payments will fundamentally change how businesses operate,” Harris added. “As electronic payments continue to grow in adoption, RTP is the perfect complement to our ACH and push-to-debit offerings.”

Some of the benefits to the new tech include bank-agnostic payments, giving businesses an “efficient and fast” way to get payments out and a way to get around in-transit payments, which can improve cash flow.

The new program will also offer better contextual data for business operations, including remittance and invoice information.

And there will be more easy access to the RTP network from a single, simple integration with the Dwolla payment platform.

Dwolla’s solution comes powered by Cross River Bank, which uses the RTP Network and provides FinTech clients the ability to send, clear and settle payments instantaneously, per the release. There are advanced messaging capabilities and a focus on compliance, and the release noted that real-time payments give companies a better way to make consistent or bigger vendor payments that can do away with the larger payment costs associated with cards.

The Clearing House (TCH) Senior Vice President of Sales and Relationship Management Elena Whisler told PYMNTS that the step for financial institutions to evolve is that they need to become “24/7” institutions to accommodate customers’ needs for faster, more efficient finance operations. She said that in addition to technical connectivity, institutions need to look at updates to things like customer service and liquidity management.

Whisler added that real-time payments could be seen as somewhat of a misnomer, as it could encompass much more like additional data and instant payment confirmation.