In this episode of Fintech Confidential, Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with David Glaser, CEO of Dwolla, for a one-on-one conversation about what's really happening inside the payments industry. From JP Morgan's surprise open banking fee announcement to the growing power of stablecoins and AI-first systems, this conversation covers the ground that matters most to anyone building, running, or investing in financial technology.

Dwolla has been in the account-to-account payments space for over 15 years. The company was built before RTP existed, before open banking was a thing, and before real-time rails were available in the US. That history matters because it shows how far the industry has come, and how much work is still left to do.

One of the biggest stories around Open Banking is JP Morgan's decision to charge fees for data access. That move has the potential to change the economics of how apps, websites, and B2B platforms connect to bank account data. It affects fraud scoring, account verification, routing number access, and every transaction that relies on those connections. The US has been late to open banking compared to Europe's PSD2, India's UPI, and Brazil's PIX. Those markets used regulation to push adoption. The US has leaned on the private sector to build it out through APIs and consumer-facing apps. Now that a major bank is putting a price tag on access, the question is whether this speeds things up or slows everything down.

The cost of participation is real. Banks need to build APIs, add real-time components, and modernize their platforms just to comply with the CFPB standards being rolled out. That takes money. And if the banks are spending to build, they're going to look for ways to recover those costs.

Scaling a payments company comes with its own set of problems. When Dwolla was founded in Des Moines, Iowa, the local talent pool didn't include many payments or banking experts. A lot of the early systems were homegrown, built from scratch to fill gaps that existing infrastructure didn't cover. That worked in the early days, but it doesn't hold up when you're trying to serve enterprise clients who expect smooth onboarding, fast compliance checks, clean dashboards, and reliable reconciliation.

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The approach to fixing that was methodical. Step one: document every process. Step two: consolidate systems and data into as few places as possible. Step three: build clean interfaces so both internal teams and customers have one place to go. Once those three pieces were in place, automation became possible, not before.

There's a framework in play here that's worth paying attention to. It separates every process into two categories: "above the line" and "below the line." Above the line is anything that requires a human, whether it's because there's no API available, the data involves sensitive PII, or the task simply doesn't follow predictable rules. Below the line is everything that can be automated because it's repeatable, rule-based, and API-accessible. The discipline is in mapping every process honestly and then throwing automation tools at everything below the line while freeing up people to handle the hard stuff above it.

That framework allowed Dwolla to scale without hiring a single net-new employee in two years.

They also get into what transaction data is revealing about the broader economy. As an example, at the beginning of 2025, right after the election, consumer behavior almost stopped. January and February went flat in a way that hadn't happened before. That kind of signal shows up in account-to-account payment volumes before it shows up in traditional economic reports. When tariff concerns eased and delays were announced, activity came back. Being able to see those shifts in real time gives companies a strategic advantage that traditional analysts don't have.

Interest rate changes also had a direct impact. When rates moved off zero in 2022, credit lending and real estate volumes dropped immediately. That hit fintech companies hard, especially startups that relied on venture funding that was suddenly more expensive. It forced a strategy shift toward serving larger, enterprise-level businesses that were already upgrading their own legacy systems.

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Real-time payment rails like RTP, FedNow, and same-day ACH are now live in the US. The adoption is slow, and that's by design. Not every use case needs instant settlement. Insurance premium payments, for example, are low-risk and predictable; speed doesn't add value there. But an insurance company paying out a claim on a Saturday morning after a hurricane? That's where real-time payments become a true differentiator. Gig worker payouts, remittances, and cross-border B2B payments with tariff tracking are other areas where speed and data richness matter.

The bigger play is orchestration. Instead of forcing businesses to figure out which rail, which method, and which timing works best for each transaction, the idea is to let them share their preferences and business rules, and then let the platform decide. How much do they want to pay per transaction? Are payins more important than payouts? What day of the week do payments need to go out? That kind of intelligent routing across ACH, RTP, FedNow, open banking tools, stablecoins, FX rails, and debit networks is where the industry is heading.

Then there's stablecoins. The view here is that stablecoins have the potential to fundamentally change the entire financial infrastructure, not just for cross-border, but for everything. The key requirement is strong regulation, just like the dollar and the banking system are regulated today. If done right, stablecoins eliminate a massive amount of manual work, paper-based systems, and spreadsheet reconciliation. Every new system built to support them will be AI-first, API-enabled, and ledger-based from day one.

The advice for fintech founders is straightforward: build everything with AI, keep teams as small as possible, eliminate manual effort wherever you can, and spend serious time understanding your customer's actual problems. The companies that move fast and stay flexible will win. The ones that wait will get passed, possibly faster than the internet left behind legacy businesses a generation ago.

JP Morgan just put a price tag on open banking access, and the ripple effects are hitting every company that connects to bank account data. Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with David Glaser, CEO of Dwolla, to break down what that means for payments, operations, and the businesses caught in between. Glaser shares the exact framework his team uses to separate what humans still need to touch from what automation can handle, a method that let them scale without adding a single employee in two years. The conversation covers how real-time payment rails like RTP and FedNow are being adopted, why stablecoin regulation could reshape the entire financial system, and what transaction data reveals about the economy before traditional reports catch up. If you're building, running, or funding anything in payments right now, this is the conversation that fills in the gaps most people are missing.

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When AI tools tell you what you want to hear, the output becomes useless. Dwolla's CEO suggests you now includes a devil's advocate clause in every prompt to force the model to challenge assumptions instead of reinforcing them.

Processing power is compounding at a rate that makes six-month-old systems feel outdated. Companies that aren't actively retooling their AI approach on that same cycle are falling behind before they even launch.

KYB processes in the US still depend on calling a secretary of state's office and waiting for faxed ownership documents. There's no reliable API for verifying beneficial owners, making business onboarding one of the most manual and time-consuming steps in payments.

Companies that know supply chain, insurance, or trucking inside and out still struggle when they try to build their own money movement layer. The pattern is clear: vertical experts solve industry problems and outsource payment infrastructure to companies that specialize in it.

Platforms like Make and Gumloop are being used to automate sticky back-office processes that used to require full-time staff. Interns are now building automation workflows that handle return processing, proof of address checks, and case routing without writing a single line of code.

With consumer permission, lenders can now see account balances, deposit frequency, and bill payment history before approving a loan. That level of visibility lets them confirm whether a borrower has room left in their checking account after payday to cover a new car payment.

Both networks historically positioned themselves as protectors of consumer data, not owners of it. That neutral third-party stance let them sit between issuers and acquirers while maintaining full visibility into transaction flows across the entire network.

When automation stalled on complex end-to-end processes, the solution wasn't more process owners; it was bringing in engineers to identify which pieces could be programmed and where AI could work. That cross-functional move broke the logjam and unlocked the above-the-line, below-the-line framework.

The speed of AI and stablecoin adoption means companies that wait too long won't get the slow decline that Blockbuster or Xerox experienced. The next wave of failures will happen in months, not decades, because the technology gap compounds faster than any previous industry shift.

The new messaging standard is pushing richer, more structured data into every US transaction. That means better reconciliation, cleaner cross-border tracking, and the ability to attach tariff and origin-of-goods information to B2B payments.

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AI has made it possible to generate millions of dollars in revenue per person on your team, and that ratio is only going up. Stop defaulting to "we need to hire for that." Before you post a job req, ask whether a tool, a workflow, or an automation can handle 80% of the role. The companies winning right now are the ones that treat headcount as a last resort, not a first instinct.

Every six months, major AI players release updates that combine what three or four startups were building separately into a single feature. If you're still polishing your original idea while the market shifts underneath you, you're already late. Build fast, validate faster, and never get so attached to your product that you can't tear it apart and rebuild it next quarter.

It feels productive to automate a Slack notification or an SDR workflow, but those aren't your real problems. Your biggest bottleneck, the one you keep putting off because it's messy, is the one costing you the most time and money every single day. Go after that first, even if you can only automate half of it, because solving 50% of a massive problem beats solving 100% of something that barely moves the needle.

Set up dashboards that track how many times a case gets passed between people, teams, or systems before it closes. Every handoff is a delay, an error risk, and a cost. The episode showed how tracking case types, close times, and internal handoff counts made it obvious which processes to attack first, and that same method works whether you're running a 10-person startup or a 500-person operation.

Writing core values on a wall does nothing. Making "we are never done" and "change the status quo" the actual standard that every person on your team gets measured against changes how people show up every day. When your culture rewards staying uncomfortable and questioning how things are done, you don't need a mandate to adopt new tools or rethink old processes; your team does it on their own.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daglaser 

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Website: https://www.dwolla.com

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David Glaser is one of the most seasoned executives in the payments industry, with more than three decades of experience spanning the full arc of digital commerce, from mainframe-era systems engineering to today's real-time, API-driven payment networks. He became CEO of Dwolla, the Des Moines–based pay-by-bank infrastructure platform, in September 2023, after first joining as the company's inaugural President and COO in March 2021. His career path through EDS, IBM, CyberSource, Visa, Worldpay, and Mastercard reads as a front-row narrative of how global electronic payments evolved from niche capability to critical infrastructure.

Tedd Huff is CEO of Voalyre, a fintech advisory firm, and founder of Fintech Confidential. Over the past 25+ years, he has contributed to fintech startups as an Advisory Board Member, Co-Founder, and Chief Experience Officer, providing strategic and tactical direction for global companies. His expertise focuses on growth while delivering process improvements and user experience-driven value to simplify the complexity of payments. As host and executive producer of Fintech Confidential, Tedd brings entertaining and informative content focused on fintech industry insights, market trends, and stories from fintech leaders, thinkers, and doers. He is a recognized thought leader and U.S. Army veteran known for making complex financial technology approachable and engaging through his conversational storytelling style and deep understanding of global payments, cross-border transactions, and payment localization.

This has been a production of DD3 Media with all rights reserved. This content is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. We strive to provide accurate and up-to-date information, but will not be responsible for any missing facts or inaccurate information. You comply and understand that you should use any of this information at your own risk. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial assets, so research and make your own financial decisions. 

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