Instagram Ad Platform Popular Pays Saves Time With Dwolla

According to eMarketer, social network ad spending will reach $35.98 billion by 2017, representing 16% of all digital ad spending globally.

To keep up with the rising demand for digital content, marketers are turning to software solutions like Popular Pays to collaborate with creators and produce high performing content at the speed and scale of social. Their company changes the way marketers create content. Whether marketers want to partner with influencers, content creators, brand ambassadors, or internal creative teams, Popular Pays’ software increases the efficiency and agility of creative teams.

To improve the efficiency of their own team, Popular Pays integrated the Dwolla API in two weeks with one developer, slashing time spent performing manual payout processing tasks by 50% and reducing payouts processing costs by 31% in the first month.

Simplifying Payouts

Popular Pays should be able to simply automate payouts to its creators’ bank accounts. Before Dwolla, its existing payment solution charged a high per-transaction fee that took up to 10 days to process. They wanted a solution to eliminate the daily chores for its accounting department like manual single-payment processing, fee computation and reconciliation.

While exploring payment solutions to replace its payout provider, Popular Pays discovered that many of these solutions required workarounds and higher transaction fees to support the automated funds flow that it desired for its marketplace.

Popular Pays used the Dwolla Platform to link its creators’ bank accounts to their existing Popular Pays account, and designed its payout integration so that accountants could initiate payouts to creators in a few clicks of a button. This allowed for payments to be reconciled and initiated more quickly.

The flexibility and payment automation of the Dwolla API allowed the accounting department at Popular Pays to decrease time spent on manual accounts payable tasks by 50% (and they expect to increase time saved as they scale and increase the level of automation), while drastically reducing reconciliation errors.

Transfer times from Popular Pays to its creators were reduced from 10 business days to one or two business days.

Future-Proof Technology Stack

Popular Pays needed to integrate with a payment provider that consistently invested in updating its technology stack.

Specifically, Popular Pays was looking for a RESTful API that could scale quickly while operating in a white label capacity—all without disrupting the customer experience.

Dwolla’s receive-only functionality allowed Popular Pays to programmatically and securely connect receivers (i.e. creators) to their bank accounts within the platform’s payouts and registration processes.

Popular Pays onboarded 43% of its active creators within three weeks of launching its new payouts process, accelerating its rate of return from improvements in cost efficiencies.