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Comment by bigtunacan | Hacker News Reader

I keep waiting for Square and Dwolla to merge in some form as that seems like a great way for Square to start cutting out the credit card companies.

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Dwolla is an extraordinarily unscrupulous business.

They marketed their service for years as 'free from chargebacks' and then (without notice!) silently deleted transactions which had, in fact, been charged back: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/07/tradehill-sues-suing-dwoll...

Dwolla is nothing more than a fancy front-end on top of a credit union in Iowa. I tried to use it for my business back in 2011, but it was just too slow -- takes 2 weeks for money to get in (1 week transfer from their bank account to Veridian and 1 week from Veridian to your bank account) and 2 weeks for money to get out (same in the other direction). Very disappointing.

Harassed as many people as I could for information on FiSync so I could try to offer integration to local credit unions and banks and couldn't get any real information out of them on it; it was a phantom program back when I was looking.

its a bit different these days.

I know Dwolla's FiSync protocol is being adopted by more banks and is zero-cost, but for Square to provide the consumer coverage most merchants expect they would have to wait for FiSync to get to a much larger scale.

How would Dwolla help Square cut out the CC companies?

I think FiSync and Square both benefit from a vertical merger (I'm considering then to be in separate market spaces rather than competitors; which certainly could be debated). Both get a near term benefit of the expanded customer base which should help them expand. FiSync would benefit Square as would Dwolla Credit as a credit card alternative

Credit cards won't be immediately replaced as they are accepted virtually everywhere. I think Square could be positioned well to replace credit cards though using the old Microsoft model of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Embrace credit cards in the short game. Extend with direct payments (bank to bank and alternative line of revolving credit). Extinguish; pull the plug on the credit card companies once they achieve high enough rate of adoption.

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