V-Sum Five
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Technical Briefings
Meg Nakamura & Willis Jackson III
Meg Nakamura, Willis Jackson III, and Mike of Apto Payments demo Apto\'s self-service card issuance platform — the answer to years of customer complaints about how long and how expensive standing up a card program used to be. The new Apto is developer-first and fully self-service: design, build, launch, and scale a debit or prepaid card program without ever talking to a salesperson. The demo walks through real signup, API keys, a cardholder app delivered via TestFlight, KYC-backed cardholder onboarding, sandbox test transactions, and the production application (revenue split, KYB, UBO capture, off-the-shelf card designs, $500 collateral). Meg funds her card via ACH and a linked debit card, adds it to Apple Pay, and buys a Raygun t-shirt online — the transaction appears in both the Apto admin and the cardholder app within seconds. A closing demo fires an Apto API call to credit $20 to the cardholder wallet as a marketing incentive, and Willis covers the mobile SDK vs. white-label wrapper paths to shipping the cardholder app under your own brand.
Skyler Nesheim & Ben Schmitt
Ben and Skyler Nesheim of Dwolla demo "programming the Fed and The Clearing House" — Dwolla\'s flexible ACH, same-day ACH, push-to-debit, and real-time payments (RTP) API that businesses use to program collections, disbursements, and stored-value flows. The demo opens on launch day for Dwolla RTP: already live in sandbox, newly live in production. A command-line "David Lightman" app walks through the full Dwolla payment stack — create a lightweight customer, upgrade to a verified customer with SSN and address, add a bank funding source, then fire four transfers back-to-back. Standard ACH requires only source URL, destination URL, currency, and amount. Same-day ACH adds a one-field "clearing object." Push-to-debit only changes the destination URL. RTP changes one line — the processing channel. Throughout the demo, Dwolla fires webhooks (customer completed, bank transfer completed, etc.) so applications can react in real time.
Lindsay Davis & Jeff Hendren
Lindsay Davis and Jeff Hoffer of Atomic demo Atomic's payroll-connectivity APIs — used by hundreds of thousands of consumers per month across challenger banks, neobanks, and online lenders to switch direct deposits, verify employment, and verify income. Atomic ships a standard SDK across iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and Kotlin that partners typically integrate in ~4 hours. The demo walks through launching Transact inside a partner app (passing a unique GUID and the destination account/routing number), distinguishing Deposit (write) flows from Identify/Verify (read) flows, and handling the employer-vs-payroll-provider selection. Atomic's conversion engineering is a differentiator: reverse-engineered in-modal password resets push authentication conversion to ~70%, and two-factor authentication (present in ~28% of logins) is handled inside the flow. Linked accounts enable periodic VOE/VOI refreshes without re-prompting the user. Partial direct-deposit switches power investing apps that want to route a percentage or dollar amount of each paycheck to a new destination without the user changing their primary bank.