Penetrating an old school industry as a digital freight forwarding company requires having an attractive differentiator.
In an industry that acts as one giant ecosystem, where large, legacy companies do business with other large, legacy companies, speed of payment is the differentiator for an innovative platform to catch the eye of an ocean freight or air freight forwarding company. These companies aren’t building their own payment systems and digitally transforming on their own—they work with innovative platforms to do that for them.
Dwolla acts as the conduit between the innovative platform and the legacy logistic companies. This playbook illustrates how digital freight forwarding companies are finding their differentiator with Dwolla.
Identify Your Funds Flow
What makes Dwolla’s technology unique when applied to freight forwarding is the flexibility to configure the API for a variety of payment speeds and customer types. Before solutioning for faster payments, first determine what functionality will be needed to deliver a tailored experience to your end users. Is your business wanting to send and receive payments? Or would your platform be better to facilitate transactions between your end users?
For this example we will use Dwolla’s facilitation funds flow, which enables the users of a digital freight forwarding platform to transact with each other. With faster B2B payments, digital freight forwarding platforms that integrate the Dwolla API see customer retention increase and operational costs decrease.
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Facilitate Same Day B2B Transactions
In this example, the Koala Platform is acting as the innovative platform that has implemented the Dwolla API for faster account-to-account payments. The Koala Platform is working with the legacy companies to power payments.
Within a matter of hours, the Koala Platform can enable a Same Day ACH transaction to debit an account and a real-time payment to credit a different account.
In this example, the Koala Platform would onboard a new customer as a Verified Business within the Dwolla API. This customer type in the API represents a business intending to send or receive funds on your platform. With this example scenario, the standard transaction limit with Dwolla is $10,000 for verified users.
Any transaction on the Dwolla Platform requires at least one party—either the sender or the receiver—be verified through the identity verification process outlined in this article. For B2B payments, this type of onboarding is typically pretty standard for companies operating in higher risk and intensive regulatory environments. Once the customer is onboarded to the Koala Platform, that business is now able to transact with another, already verified and onboarded customer.
Using Same Day ACH, a debit can be pulled from an attached bank account and another Same Day ACH transaction can be initiated to credit a different bank account. As soon as funds come in, they can go right back out into the ecosystem.
This documentation explains how to use the Dwolla API to implement same day ACH payments.
To move even faster, consider real-time transactions. The example below involves these faster payment options.
“With real-time payments, it doesn’t matter if it’s a weekend or a holiday, independent contractors and driver-contractors can have funds in their bank account minutes after a transaction is initiated.”
Operations Manager at Ualett
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How a Logistics Company Uses Real-Time Payments for Disbursements
This real-world example explains how a digital platform in the cargo industry integrated the Dwolla API using a single developer to access real-time payments and Same Day ACH.
The team reduced its manual workload by 98% and reduced the total time spent on transactions by 80%.
For freight forwarders and cargo facilities on the platform, the ability to optimize the payments process, speed up transactions and be confident in the security of their payments is crucial to their business.
This innovative platform uses Same Day ACH and RTP to attract customers in the cargo industry who need to initiate fast, safe and reliable transactions.
Due to the thoroughness of Dwolla’s documentation for developers and access to a dedicated support channel, it only took one developer to integrate the Dwolla Platform with their application.
“Our return on investment was almost immediate. We were able to get up and running in no time with Dwolla’s straightforward API. Dwolla’s multiple payment methods, like Same Day ACH, gave us the flexibility our customers demand.”
CEO at CargoSprint
Read the Case Study
As more innovative platforms look to disrupt very traditional, old school industries—like freight forwarding—consider a world with frictionless payments.
Hear Dwolla’s Senior VP of Technology discuss the benefits of using a payment API for B2B payments and being bank agnostic.
