Dwolla launches MassPay - Free Bulk Payments | Hacker News Reader

Dwolla launches MassPay - Free Bulk Payments

blog.dwolla.com

73 pointsmschonfeld23 comments

Does anything else like this currently exist? If so, I can't think of it off the top of my head.

There are a few services like this out there, but they use the "old rails" (e.g Paypal, ACH, etc), and they charge fees per batch, as well as per transaction. So yes, there are similar things, but all of them are wildly more expensive...

With email? Not that I can think of.

But with regular payments? Yes, most UK banks offer batch payment facilities to business customers in the form of a CSV interface.

It's how a lot of wages are processed. The wage/accounting tool produces a batch payment file, and the bank just processes it.

If only the US banking system was as advanced as Europe's...

I don't know whether that's sarcasm or not.

I originally didn't include "UK" in my post, but then realised that my knowledge was only of UK banks and that like direct debits it may be a country specific thing.

No no, it was actually sincere. I think that the UK's financial ecosystem is far more advanced than ours in the US... Money transfers are faster, more secure, and there's more of a general sense of progress...

Except for that one bank that managed to not be able to run it's nightly batches for nearly a month earlier this year. (RBS I think?)

FWIW, CSV upload for ACH payment is a typical feature of online banking for business accounts in the US.

Yea there are things- like Checks, Paypal, ACH, and others. We tried to build the cheapest and easiest thing possible to help merchants pay out.

Paypal MassPay is what everyone already uses. %2 transaction fee, capped at $1. Dwolla is a bit cheaper, but the price difference is meaningless in most cases. This just brings Dwolla closer to feature parity. I pay about 100 people using the paypal masspay api every quarter, and I wouldn't even consider allowing Dwolla unless they had this feature.

Paypal only lets you send in up to 250 rows, right? We've set that to 2,000 - and also uncap it for trusted users... At 250 records, the fee difference might not be much, but at 2,000 - it can quickly add up to a nice sizable sum, don't you agree?

With a CSV. You can do as many as you want via the API.

I am confused. Paypal charges the fee per transaction. running mass pay 1000 times with 1 transaction is the same price as running it 4 times with 250 transactions. Paypal lets you run as many total transactions as you want. The max batch size is 250.

PayPal MassPay charges per trxn.

PayPal MassPay API: 250 trxns max per call

PayPal MassPay Manual CSV upload: 3,000 trxns

Paypal Masspay has been discontinued. If you don't have that facility already enabled, you cannot make mass payments

See this email from paypal when we tried to enable it: ------------------------------------------------------ Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding mass payments.

Mr X the mass payment facility is no longer available, the information is kept on the web site, purely for the benefit of customers who have already had this facility activated.

I apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause.

PayPal MassPay is defn available. Issue is, is that you have to ask to have it turned on today. Looks like the mail you got is inaccurate. Get your self a premier or business account, get it verified, then call up PayPal CS.

Is this limited to US-US payments?

Yes. US only.

I like to remind Dwolla about Canada once in a while on twitter. I never get a response though.

Sorry buddy. International is very much on our mind- but we are trying to stay focused on US right now. We love Canada though :)

What's the biggest issue with going international or say close neighbour as Canada? Is it simply costs that instantly get created due to cross-border measures, etc?

Regulations, mostly. Financial transaction rules and regulations are very complicated and vary from country to country. For example, dealing with EMV in Canada is a complicated process, made even more so by Interac.

Are there plans to open this up worldwide in the future? (and if so, do you have a non-committal, handwavey estimate of how far in the future? A few months/a lot of months/a few years/a lot of years?)

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