Dwolla Throws Its Hat Into The Faster Payments Ring

Dwolla, a FinTech startup, has put in its faster payments proposal to the Federal Reserve-chartered Faster Payment Task Force, joining the more than 20 responses that have been submitted.

This initiative, being led by the Fed’s task force, is being done in an effort to overhaul the U.S. payments system in order to make payments faster and more secure — in a way that keeps up with the modern demands of what consumers expect.

The proposals, including Dwolla’s, will be compared against each other to see how they stack up to the three dozen necessary criteria laid out by the Fed to modernize the payments system. These criteria were established by the task force that has more than 300 members, which come from banks, FinTech companies, merchants, the government and consumer groups.

“Our submission lays out some straightforward ideas for a faster payment system in the U.S. We know how this works because we already built one. It’s called FiSync, and many of you may have already used it,” wrote Dwolla CEO and Founder Ben Milne in a company blog. “Our submission reveals a lot about how FiSync works today and how it could work tomorrow inside an improved national payment system. I’m particularly excited about the path it paves for financial institutions to enjoy the type of platform growth we’ve seen over the years.”

“FiSync is a great technology. It assures real-time availability of good funds 24/7/365 to end users and is a tremendous leap forward in speed and security over today’s bank transfer system. Building it allowed us a very useful role in the payments world and forwarded an agenda we care about most: building the ideal way to move money,” he continued in the post.

Altogether, the proposals and assessments will be provided to the full task force later in 2016 for further review, which is then slated to be released for publication in early 2017.

“The thing about innovation is that it tends to occur and reoccur in the places that are built to nurture it. It’s time we hand off and share this innovation with the task force in hopes that it accelerates how fast the market delivers faster payments at scale. We’re appreciative of the Fed for giving us the opportunity to help and the forum in which to do so,” Milne wrote in the post.