UPDATED 12:53 EDT / DECEMBER 15 2011

NEWS

Dwolla Serves Up Instant Payment

The company Dwolla is best known for providing a payment network similar to credit cards and PayPal but without charging exorbitant fees for the exchange of money between customers. Today, the pioneering company is taking a bite out of the legacy architecture of money transfer they’ve been chafing against by releasing a service that provides instant satisfaction.

We at SiliconANGLE suspected this might be what Dwolla intended to reveal as their evolution of service paradigms.

Today, Dwolla has debut “Instant.”

Instant is an opt-in feature for Dwolla that provides immediate access to cash stored in their system to users. The feature will cost $3/mo and allow users to connect their accounts to a funding source such as a bank account that they can instantly fund transactions from (rather than filling up an escrow account.) There’s also the option to pay Dwolla later; however, for those who forget to balance their sheets with the payment service at the end of their statement date will suffer a $5 late fee penalty. Seems pretty fair, actually.

No other fees are associated with this service and it doesn’t affect the mechanism that merchants use to receive money at all. In fact, it should prove to be good for merchants by adding an incentive for customers to use Dwolla to pay for products by drawing directly from their bank accounts as there is always only a 25 cent fee for transactions over $10.

No doubt this will have an impact on the Bitcoin market. Traders there often use Dwolla as their escrow and financial transaction network due to its low overhead and similarly optimistic transaction fee. As a result of having instant funds through Dwolla, traders will also be able to more swiftly move their Bitcoins as there will be less wait for purchases.


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