payout via dwolla masspay

[colindean]

Dwolla has a newish MassPay system, which allows up to 2,000 payouts at a time (limit can be raised). There's a MassPay Node.js library, and it's likely portable to Python.

I'm not sure about the intermediary steps - I think this API may assume that people are to be paid from a company's Dwolla balance, so the need to move cash from the company bank account to Dwolla exists. That may not be able to be automated, or may have an unacceptable delay.

Also, there's a 25¢ fee to send/receive > $10. This would affect users who are receiving greater than $10 per week and who choose Dwolla as a payout option.

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• https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/6190

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[abnor]

Definitely Sounds worth investigating. Is It pay out only?

[colindean]

Masspay is payout only. Dwolla can obviously accept payments. There's an open issue about it... Not in a place where I can search for it at the moment.

LyndyPalmer [email protected] wrote:

Definitely Sounds worth investigating. Is It pay out only?

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#726 (comment)

[chadwhitacre]

cf. #65 for Dwolla SinglePay(?)

[chadwhitacre]

Dwolla sales: https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1947.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm looking at Dwolla briefly in the context of the Balanced Shutdown. We're not going to pull off Zipmark (#3491), and we have nine users we need to transition to something. PayPal is the obvious choice since we already have it implemented. I think Dwolla is technically very similar to PayPal, so if it's an easy integration then it'd be nice to be able to offer it as an alternative to PayPal, since PayPal has some detractors (e.g., #67 (comment)).

[chadwhitacre]

I've signed up for a [email protected] Dwolla account (I actually did this a while ago, but I can't find my notes).

[chadwhitacre]

... but my phone number is linked to another Dwolla account, so I'm trying to recover that account. If we end up going with Dwolla we probably want two accounts anyway (escrow and operations).

[chadwhitacre]

Called 1-888-289-8744 and had them lookup the old account by phone number (412-925-4220), and send a password reset. I have access to both accounts now.

[chadwhitacre]

I've configured the two accounts to be the same (except for different emails and phone numbers). We have an EIN mismatch with the operations Dwolla account, due to #3463; we'll see what they say during the verification process.

[chadwhitacre]

P.S. They changed their pricing model: http://blog.dwolla.com/free-bank-transfers/. No more per-transaction fees. Instead, Gratipay would pay monthly for features such as next-day transfers and higher limits: https://www.dwolla.com/pricing.

[chadwhitacre]

I've refunded the $1.00 that @bpmilne sent us when we opened our account on September 3, 2012. ;-)

[chadwhitacre]

I've kicked off trial deposit verification of our escrow bank account. This is the bank account I linked three years ago. It's at a tiny credit union, and at the time Dwolla choked on verifying it, which is what stalled us out back then.

[chadwhitacre]

MassPay looks very similar to PayPal:

[chadwhitacre]

Operations Dwolla account verified.

https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2437

[capablemonkey]

@whit537 let me know if you need any help integrating Dwolla! Happy to lend a hand.

Check out our dwolla-python library. The MassPay example file should be helpful.

When you're ready to get started, create a few accounts in our Sandbox: start here.

You can send money to anyone with an email. All they need is a US bank account to claim their money. The claiming money flow looks like this for users who don't have a Dwolla account yet:

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks @capablemonkey! Will ping you if we have questions. :-)

[webmaven]

@capablemonkey, So far as I can tell, Dwolla only freezes funds when are told to by law enforcement.

Can you make any statements regarding Dwolla's policies in this area?

Does Dwolla ever proactively freeze accounts or reverse transactions that 'seem' suspicious to you (for example, because of a sudden surge of financial activity)? This is the thing that seems to still get Kickstarter and other fundraising projects in trouble with PayPal.

[mattbk]

+1 for an alternative payout method from https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/2405, who does not want to use PayPal.

[capablemonkey]

Hey @webmaven, so sorry for the late reply.

Unfortunately, there are always bad actors who to seek to take advantage of either Dwolla or Dwolla customers. To insure the integrity of Dwolla's network, we may take proactive action as necessary in the event of fraudulent activity, activity that is prohibited by our TOS, or activity that could appear to be money laundering or terrorist financing.

We do our best to insure that these actions are limited in nature and only used when truly necessary.

[webmaven]

@capablemonkey, does Dwolla have policies in place to prevent the sort of overreaction that results in incidents like these?:
http://hackaday.com/2015/01/22/when-paypal-and-crowdfunding-dont-mix/
http://www.businessinsider.com/paypal-violin-destroy-return-refund-2012-1

[capablemonkey]

@webmaven,

We do our best to vet customers up front, and make that determination prior to holding customer funds and creating a situation like the one you mentioned. As for the violin incident, Dwolla does not currently, nor will we in the foreseeable future, have any requirement to destroy items as part of our dispute process.

[chadwhitacre]

Coming soon, Dwolla white label partners will be able to seamlessly create customer records and initiate payouts via the API. Your business name will display next to the subsequent deposits on a customer’s bank account, and all required email communication will be sent and branded from you.

But wait, there's more. This is only phase one of Dwolla's white label solution.

http://blog.dwolla.com/white-label-coming/

[webmaven]

@capablemonkey, what's the vetting porocess?

[capablemonkey]

@webmaven, here's an answer from our risk team:

The vetting process depends on the type of business and the risks surrounding it. Some of the main risks we take under consideration are credit risk and regulatory risk; for example, the more complex the regulations surrounding a business type, the more questions and/or documents we will likely need.

[webmaven]

OK, @capablemonkey, can we narrow the scope to the Open Work that Gratipay is trying to support? What vetting would I have to go through as a open source project leader/maintainer, or as the creator of open content of various sorts, etc.?

If a project on Gratipay starts seeing a large influx of payments due to increased popularity (because most successful projects start out very small), will that trigger any problems?

[capablemonkey]

On the payout side, we'd only need one party to be fully verified. It looks like your operations account is already fully vetted, so we're good there! Assuming you'll be paying out from that account, your recipients can claim their pay out by creating a lightweight Dwolla Direct account, which only requires them to create a login and provide their full name, routing and acc. no.

It sounds like you're also considering using Dwolla for pay-ins. If you do accept Dwolla on the pay-in side, would you want the tips to go directly from the tipper to the recipient? Or, would all the tips be pooled to a main 'escrow' account, where they're later disbursed? If the former, then all the users-to-be-tipped will need to create fully verified, vetted Dwolla account.

Increased popularity/volume shouldn't trigger any problems by itself.

[webmaven]

@whit537, I think @capablemonkey's Qs are best answered by you.

[webmaven]

Show me the Money! 😉

[chadwhitacre]

😜

[webmaven]

@capablemonkey, If I start the work to integrate @Dwolla into GP myself, how much assistance can I expect from you (or perhaps someone else at your company)? I'm a reasonably experienced web dev, but this would be the first payment integration that I have ever done, and I am only superficially familiar with the GP codebase at present.

IOW, are you as incentivized to get this working as I am? 😀

[spencerhunter]

@webmaven @capablemonkey transitioned out of Dwolla a few weeks ago. Unfortunately the Dwolla team has limited bandwidth at this time, however we can definitely try to help out with any questions you may have. Feel free to shoot me([email protected]) a note and @mach-kernel and I will assist in any way we can!

[chadwhitacre]

@webmaven I've initiated a manual payout to you as a next step here. Can you confirm if/when that lands? Unfortunately, we didn't get #3861 merged and I wasn't careful enough and I ran payday (gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#427) today without having recorded the exchange in your history. I've kludged it with a cash exchange route and the net net is that you now have a -1¢ balance. :P

[chadwhitacre]

@spencerhunter Thanks for reaching out! We'll circle back with you and @mach-kernel when we're ready to move forward with a full implementation. :-)

[webmaven]

@whit537, I got notification of a pending payment on Dec 1st, I am still waiting for it to clear.

[chadwhitacre]

@webmaven We got a notification that the payment is complete. Look good on your end?

[webmaven]

Yep.

[mattbk]

+1 from https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/4078.

[chadwhitacre]

@rohitpaulk Picking up from #3870 (comment) ... what do you need from me here? We have an account set up and we have the green light from Dwolla risk.

[chadwhitacre]

Over the past year we’ve made a strategic pivot, transitioning our focus away from a consumer application to a SaaS model designed for businesses who need to access the ACH network and incorporate bank transfers into their own application or service.

http://blog.dwolla.com/your-brand-our-payments-platform/

[spencerhunter]

@whit537 and @rohitpaulk Let me know if I can assist in answering any questions on the Dwolla integration. Gordon provided an example here if you're looking to use python. Here are a few additional helpful links:

https://docs.dwolla.com/#oauth
https://docs.dwolla.com/#masspay

I also wanted to mentioned that we recently released MassPay in our new v2 API: https://docsv2.dwolla.com/#masspay

[nobodxbodon]

Re-ticketed to gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#974 for further discussion and planning. After deciding on concrete implementation plan and dev work starts, this will be reopened for tracking purpose.