Bank account verification and transfers in just a few lines of code
blog.dwolla.com
blog.dwolla.com
Bank account verification like this is a huge improvement over the we'll-deposit-some-pennies-in-your-account scheme. We require users to have a verified funding source in Dwolla... and the 2-3 day wait I'm sure has been a turn off for many, so this is a cool feature.
Ben Milne seems like a good CEO and the company seems to be run from a long-term perspective, which is refreshing. Their decision to completely eschew the credit card processors and provide no-cost online transactions and micro-payments is also a breath of fresh air.
They claimed for years their transactions were 'irreversible' and then went ahead and secretly reversed (read: just deleted them from the db and claimed not to know about them) a bunch of transactions that bankrupted Tradehill. Disgusting company.
http://observer.com/2012/03/dwolla-was-just-sued-by-bitcoine...
1. The fact that a payment company connected to ACH, a reversible payment method, would claim something like this demonstrates gross incompetence at best.
2. If they didn't want high risk customers like TradeHill they should have politely kicked them off the service, not kept them on while silently defrauding them of their money and hoping they wouldn't notice.
> Using an online payment service for currency trading is not the best idea.
What, TradeHill should have expected Dwolla to violate their own terms of service (no chargebacks) and therefore it's their own fault? That's asinine.
Am I missing something?
Imagine if "login with facebook" meant "tell my startup your facebook password".
How is this considered OK?
If I might snark for a second:
Because banks say: "We're the bank. We're run by Masters of the Universe, we are the smartest people in the room, and you can trust us and our data-handling practices!"
To be serious: Having to disclose the same credentials that give you access to the web UI for your bank accounts to a random third-party in order to use their service is insane.
A slightly different use-case, but does anyone know of a good service that replaces the need for nightly ACH batch processing that works with good old fashion routing number and account number (and maybe some other details OTHER than banking credentials)?
Curious how important same-day vs next-day is for you?
I think Dwolla should go one step further. How about exposing APIs to get statements? Getting statements is one of the PITA with banks and many analytics application scenarios would open us with these APIs if they were easier to use than that of Yodlee.
So they are effectively piggybacking on IFX calls on these bank servers and still using ACH (Account Clearing House?). This is a programmer friendly easily embeddable api for web sites etc. but still using the standard stuff. To call it "Transfer Platform" is a bit confusing to me. I would be damned if Dwolla is actually doing an IFX SignOn with those user name and password, for verifying accounts.
In the UK, for example, I can easily transfer money to other people's or business's accounts and it will arrive within 2 hours, and generally it's immediate.
If you need to transfer between countries, then it gets more interesting and you get forex's involved.
When Balanced shut down, they encouraged users to go over to Stripes private beta.
This library aside, I've grown accustomed to every "Do complex thing X in a few lines of code" announcement to, as a rule, mean "as long as you're using our sparkly new library." So much so that it seems rather silly to even mention a library is required. Of course it is. The hard work was wrapped up into a nice interface for everyone to use.
As much as I've grown tired of the automatic developer default to include third-party libraries to do everything, things such as financial transactions seem like one area where it's unlikely one will ever be able to do anything without libraries in a few lines of code.
It's worth pointing out here that every practical hello world program that I'm aware of invokes thousands of lines of library code beneath it (many years ago I was agog when looking at printf source code). Let's skip any talk of how python or ruby are only a few lines of code :)
Maybe you are too smart for that, write it in assembly! Just a few opcodes and some other dark magic. Well then there's an operating system you invoke. But wait, even if you got around all of that, there are thousands of lines of RTL code that created your CPU, i.e. an entire and much more obscure library stack sitting beneath all of that.
So yeah, you are sitting at some of level of abstraction in the technology stack, and your responsibility should just be a few lines of code ;) I am always blown away at how much leverage we have now (for example, am still just enamored with rails, regardless of any further refinements in the arena, it is still simply amazing to me), just compared to a few years ago, and it keeps getting more powerful.
The integration with banks happens on Dwolla's servers, not in any client libraries they may offer.
This library in question is just a thin wrapper around validation and AJAX for talking to Dwolla's HTTP API.
The code for a Dwolla API consumer to make a bank transfer could be just a few lines, without any libraries, which is what I was expecting to see, not that this demo isn't cool too. Showing off that your API is so straightforward you don't need a client library to use it would be good marketing to me.
Here's an example from another payments startup that used to make similar posts on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5026802
I was always super impressed with Balanced and the way they communicated with developers.
That a post doesn't meet a reader's expectations doesn't in any way mean the post is being misleading. Unless, of course, they'd added some additional language to the title to imply they weren't talking about using their tools. Which almost never happens on HN.
Pure checksum verification (used for some account number plausibility checks) can actually be done in a couple of lines of code. This is something different entirely.
Please don't get me wrong - this doesn't mean I don't appreciate the library. I just think adding "with our library" wouldn't have hurt.