Dwolla Rebrands Suite of ACH Payment Tools as ‘Transfer’

Dwolla was always a strange name.

The word — a contraction of ‘web’ and ‘dollar’ dreamed up by founder Ben Milne with the aid of a six-pack — is something of a cherished fintech institution, if little known outside the space.

The Dwolla brand takes a step back today with the announcement that its bundled suite of ACH payment tools will be rebranded as Transfer. Dwolla also has a payment API called Access API.

And those services, for now, are all that Dwolla is. “Think of Dwolla as an umbrella now with two products: Access API and Transfer,” Director of Communications Jordan Lampe told Bank Innovation. Access API is for developers, Transfer is for non-developers.

CEO Ben Milne wrote the following yesterday:

Unlike our API products, there’s no coding with Transfer, making it ideal for small to medium-sized businesses looking for a turn-key solution. As usual, we do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to compliance, security, and customer notifications.

The fee is simple and fair: 0.5% per transaction ($0.01 min fee, $5 max fee). You can pay as you go and upgrade as you grow. Once your volume goes up and your transaction fees increase, you can upgrade to a monthly package starting at $250 and remove the transaction fees.

In November, Dwolla announced it would shut down its consumer-facing payments businesses. “Dwolla is no longer the app you download to make a payment — it’s the API you use to build payments into your own app,” the company noted in a blogpost on Nov. 11.

The naming of startups, much like the naming of cats, is a difficult matter. For one thing, quirky names like Yahoo or Dwolla are more expensive to build brand awareness around. Dwolla did that, and has raised more than $39 million in venture funding to become an established player in the world of bank transfers and faster payments.