Originally published by Dave Glaser, Dwolla CEO, in CFOTech
Platforms across real estate, lending, insurance and marketplaces are embedding payments directly into their digital experiences because users increasingly expect to complete transactions without leaving the platform.
While this shift brings speed and convenience, it also brings new responsibilities. When you move money inside your product, you are handling sensitive data, creating new risk and setting expectations for performance, compliance and trust.
Without trust, the experience breaks down. Customers move to competitors, operations require constant manual intervention and scaling becomes difficult. Building trust starts with how you design security into your system.
The Role of Trust in Embedded Finance
When we talk to enterprise leaders, the conversation centers on reliability. They need infrastructure that supports secure connections, provides real-time insight and performs consistently under pressure.
Customers expect fast and frictionless payments, while internal teams need automation that scales. At the same time, regulators require protected and auditable data. Meeting these expectations requires secure system design from the start.
Trust has to be architected into every layer of the platform so customers, teams and partners can depend on the experiences you deliver. You build it through consistent decisions about how data is protected, how systems are monitored and how operations are designed.
Where Embedded Finance Often Falls Short
The challenges we see in the market are consistent. Platforms may work fine at low volume, but as transaction count grows, gaps start to appear.
APIs from different providers may lack consistency, payments may route through third-party services with limited control and reconciliation may require manual work. These issues create blind spots, and in financial services, blind spots are costly.
When something breaks, support teams are caught off guard, finance leaders lack clear records and customers lose confidence. This creates operational risk and increases the likelihood of security gaps. The solution is infrastructure that addresses these issues before they scale, combining speed, visibility and security from the start.
What a Security-First Model Looks Like
Building security into payment systems from the start means you design to prevent problems rather than respond to them after they happen.
Data protection starts with encryption at rest and in transit. From there, you layer in audit trails, granular access controls and tokenization so businesses can connect to financial institutions without storing raw credentials. When an issue occurs or an audit begins, you need a clear record of who did what and when.
Security-first design also requires visibility. Real-time insight into payment location, immediate notification of failed transactions and consistent reporting across payment types give businesses the clarity to respond quickly and maintain operational control.
Operational control matters just as much as data security. When you consolidate payment orchestration on a single platform, you reduce your attack surface, eliminate manual steps and maintain consistency across the customer experience.
How Dwolla is Building for Trust
In 2025, we expanded our payment platform to offer real-time orchestration between the RTP® network and the FedNow® Service. Clients can now access both rails through a single API, which reduces integration time and broadens real-time coverage as the landscape of instant rails continues to evolve.
We also invested in the developer experience. Our team released a new TypeScript SDK. We launched Virtual Account Numbers and improved visibility into funding sources so teams have better tools to manage payments securely at scale.
Dwolla reports 99.9% uptime. That performance supports platforms that depend on us to move money every day and reflects the discipline of our engineering team and the resilience of our system. Consistent uptime matters because payment operations don't pause, and platforms need infrastructure that performs reliably under continuous demand.
Dwolla uses tokenized bank data, enforces role-based access, logs every transaction and supports SOC 2 Type II compliance. These features help our clients stay ready for audits and reduce operational risk. Security decisions are embedded in how we architect the platform, not added after the fact.
One real estate platform used Dwolla to process over 120,000 earnest money deposits totaling more than $700 million with zero fraud. An insurance provider automated claim reimbursements, which improved payout speeds and reduced manual processing time. When security and operational design work together from the beginning, these outcomes become possible.
Security is the Strategy
For enterprises embedding finance, security cannot be delayed. It must be part of the product strategy from the beginning. This protects against loss, enables scale, reduces friction for internal teams and ensures you deliver on a brand promise with every transaction. Platforms that prioritize security from day one spend less time managing issues and more time building features their users actually need.
At Dwolla, we are focused on helping those companies succeed. Our mission is to simplify the way businesses move money. We achieve this by building infrastructure that is reliable, secure and designed to scale with our clients.
If you're building embedded finance into your product, the foundation you choose matters. You need infrastructure that can support your growth and protect your users at the same time. That's what we've built at Dwolla, and we're ready to help you do the same.