Streamlining B2B Payments With Dwolla

Software gives finance departments the opportunity to do more by working less.

This concept was discussed during a lunch meeting in 2016 by a pair of software developers, Omri Mor and Tom Harel. They couldn’t stop talking about how difficult it was for a business to transact with another business. From collecting information to authorizing payments, there had to be a better way—or so they discussed.

That lunch meeting led to hundreds of product discovery interviews with companies across the United States and eventually a simple, yet robust software platform.

That platform is Routable, a payment platform streamlining business-to-business payments with its ACH transactions powered by Dwolla’s ACH payment API. With customers like ReMax and Ticketmaster, finance departments are finding new ways to spend their time.

“We are building a platform that is building software for finance and accounting departments,” says Mor, the CEO & Co-Founder of Routable. “We have found that those departments are usually underrepresented in the sense that they may not have the latest technology. So we’re helping these companies streamline their processes and implement better policies.”

Mor says Routable is trimming time spent on bookkeeping by 70% with another 30% saved on transaction costs.

“I did not expect our platform to be this well received,” Mor says. “The ability to build software that isn’t just good, but human, is really hard. We’ve been able to win customers because of that and because of the work we do with Dwolla.”

Personable Software

Prior to building their platform in May of 2017, Mor and his co-founder were accepted into Y Combinator, a 90-day accelerator for early stage startups. Based on that experience, Mor says he and Harel estimated they would need six months to build a prototype.

“We did it in six weeks,” Mor says. “And mostly thanks to Dwolla.”

While Mor and Harel were building out their platform, they were integrating with Dwolla. After “a lot of conversations” with members of Dwolla’s sales and customer support teams, the pair was able to build a solution and test in the Dwolla Sandbox against various scenarios.

“We went from testing our application to up and running with a new payments integration in six weeks, that speaks for itself,” Mor says, referring to the Dwolla Sandbox. “There were no surprises going from testing in Dwolla’s Sandbox to the production environment. I think there’s just initial shock when your application is facilitating live transactions and feeling the need to constantly monitor all of them.

“What’s unique about Dwolla is their stronghold on ACH. And for business payments, ACH transactions for an invoice is usually more preferable. Dwolla helps us initiate ACH transfers which is huge in the B2B community. Paying out someone has to be timely and prompt. With Dwolla and leveraging the ACH Network, we have the ability to be relevant in this market.”

“Dwolla really is best in class,” Mor says. “Dwolla has this wonderful API and a great platform, but Dwolla is human. That’s different and it really matters.”

Reducing Manual Tasks

Before Routable, Mor says one of their customers had an accounting department that was manually typing accounting and routing numbers more than 400 times—then licking and mailing over 250 envelopes—each month, just for making their payments.

“We replaced that business’ manual payment process,” Mor says. “They are now saving thousands of dollars each week and an immeasurable amount of time by using Routable’s platform. Not only did they have to perform these tasks each month, then they had to manage all the questions about where the money is.

“We do that for them now.”

A business can create a Routable account and have it verified within five minutes. Keeping that process short and sweet was important to Mor, since so many people are already hesitant to give out their banking information, building out a seamless onboarding experience was crucial.

“Dwolla has helped train us in how to work well with other providers,” Mor says. “We are much more professional, we know the questions to ask and we know the right way to do things when integrating and working with a team.”

Routable achieves excellence by consistently focusing on doing little things well over time, constantly improving and consistently providing first-class customer support. Those initiatives found a supportive partner in Dwolla.

“It’s not easy being a fintech company,” Mor says. “There are always questions about where the money is. One of the reasons we choose to keep working with Dwolla is there are a lot of cases where a transaction is delayed or you don’t know what happened, just having that ability to reach out to an actual person and resolve that quickly, then pass that information on to our customers as promptly as possible, that’s really awesome.”