Microsoft, which recently launched a cloud service aimed at all levels of governments, has selected Dwolla to provide secure, inexpensive electronic payments.
At its Government Cloud Summit in Washington earlier this week, Microsoft launched Azure Government with integrated services such as compute resources, storage, data, networking and applications, all hosted in Microsoft data centers located within the U.S. and managed by cleared U.S. personnel. The company said its cloud services meet or exceed public sector security, privacy and compliance standards and have been designed to help government agencies integrate disparate on-premises, cloud and data systems.
The new platform provides governments the kind of cloud-based benefits that the private sector takes for granted, such as interoperability, speed, scale, and economics while addressing the security, compliance, and regulatory needs of U.S. local, state, and federal governments such as FedRAMP, CJIS and HIPAA. The hybrid and tiered product offerings should make the Microsoft Azure cloud platform attractive for government agencies from the Department of Defense to local municipalities.
Microsoft selected Dwolla, the Iowa-based real-time payments company, as the only payments provider on the government cloud, at least so far.
Payments inside governments are atrocious, said Jordan Lampe, Dwolla's director of communications and policy affairs. Manually processing checks is costly, prone to error, and can have long delays. Agencies rarely have the resources to modernize their systems.
Dwolla has been helping governments address many of the usual modernization dilemmas—strained budgets, legacy systems, or low resources—for nearly two years. The company provides simple smart bank transfers, low-cost transactions and dynamic APIs.
Lampe said Dwolla has a proven track record in the modernization of payment operations for state, local, and, soon to be announced, federal governments. For example, the Iowa Department of Revenue has replaced its manual check operations, improving productivity and fulfillment times of tax stamps.
“Meanwhile cities, like Evanston, Illinois, are collecting municipal fees with our custom turnkey checkout solution, Form Builder, and government vendors, like IowaTaxAndTags, are saving citizens tens of thousands of dollars each year in card processing fees. Our easy to integrate and low-cost solution even allowed the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles to bring part of its payment collections online.”
Dwolla charges $.25 for transactions over $10, lower transaction are free and it provides paperless processing, automatic email receipts and real-time notifications.
Governments are well-known for outsourcing payments, such as parking meters and transit, to outside vendors, said Lampe Dwolla can put those payments back in the hands of government.
Azure Government provides hybrid, hyperscale, enterprise-grade solutions that enable government agencies to run the operating systems, languages and application of choice in Microsoft’s government cloud, public cloud or their own datacenter with a consistent platform and the flexibility and capacity to scale up or down on demand. As one of 50 partners selected by Microsoft for the Government Cloud rollout, Dwolla can offer moder payment services to participants.
