No mail-order brides, no human hair, and no money service businesses. These rules are part of Braintree’s Acceptable Use Policy.

That means you can’t build the next Venmo or PayPal using Braintree.

But what if you want to build that next Redfin or Zillow for real-estate, the next Robinhood or Wealthfront for investing, or the next Simple for banking?

Have you sent money through Venmo or PayPal? Have you bought stuff on Amazon? Sending money and buying stuff with money are different in the eyes of regulators, so there are different APIs for these different use cases.

Which API should you use for regulated financial activities?

Braintree or Stripe? Neither. Those are great for letting people buy stuff. As with Braintree, money transmitting is on Stripe’s restricted businesses list.

The top money APIs for advanced use cases are Dwolla, SynapseFi, and Sila.

tl;dr: Check out Dwolla, SynapseFi, and Sila. Go with Sila if you want lower fees and you want to be an early adopter. Go with Dwolla if you want a faster implementation. Go with SynapseFi if you want lots of features.

Cost

Sila has the best price at all tiers, but the difference is especially staggering at their lowest tier. You start at $2/user/day — great for early testing. And that’s thousands of dollars cheaper per month than Sila’s competitors.

Dwolla and SynapseFi don’t publish their fees. You must schedule a phone call with sales. I may have been under NDA on those calls, so let’s just say you have to pay thousands a month, no matter how small your app is.

Quality

Dwolla has been around the longest, since 2010. The docs prove it. Their case studies with over a dozen apps suggest that Dwolla works in production.

SynapseFi doesn’t have a case studies page, but according to their website they have handled over $10B in transactions.

Sila just released Beta in April 2019. It’s fresh! It sometimes requires creative workarounds, as I described in an article about Native Addon Modules for Node.js. But it does work. The functions you see listed here in their JavaScript SDK docs and their main docs do what they say they do.

Developer Agility

Dwolla has been around long enough to work out most of the kinks in its core product. I was able to make sandbox API calls within minutes and I was able to schedule a phone call within just a day or two. You can even press a button and start exploring the endpoints in Postman.

If you’re a Node.js/JavaScript developer, you can take a look at Sila’s JavaScript SDK docs and see for yourself that it’s straightforward. At Serverless Guru, we’ve been able to build solutions using the Sila SDK. They also have an SDK for Python and more languages, features, and documentation is being added frequently.

Pro Tip: If you send them a message to Sila on their website, you may get access to their customer Slack channel. The Sila developers respond to my questions on that channel within hours—more often in minutes.

If you’re a Node.js/JavaScript developer like me, get started with the npm libraries here:

• sila-sdk
• dwolla-v2
• synapsepay

Crypto!

Behind the scenes, Sila is the only one of these three using a cryptocurrency. But don’t worry, it’s not like Bitcoin. It’s not a traded currency. It’s a stable coin. 100 Sila coins are always equal to 1 USD.

Dwolla and SynapseFi use USD all the way.

End User Experience

SynapseFi has the widest range of products, so you can enable credit and debit card payments and wire transfers — whatever your end-user wants.

Dwolla has been taking a hard stance as a competitor of the big credit and debit card companies since early on, so they have not accepted card payments in their nine-year history. You can see their Founder and CEO discuss that in this interview from 2013. All transfers to and from the Dwolla network are through ACH transfers.

Like Dwolla, Sila only accepts ACH transfers, but they do plan to accept cards later this year.

UX, part 2 — Know Your Customer

For any service to enable two-way money transfers, they must confirm their user’s identity. They must do their due diligence. The API provider must Know Your Customer (KYC). Your app may be enabling easier financial transactions, but users still must fill out thinks like legal name and address.

Here are a couple of code samples of KYC, just for fun:

KYC with Sila’s JavaScript SDK:

  
sila.requestKYC(user, key)
  .then(res => { /* Handle response */ })
  .catch(err => { /* Handle errors */ });
  

With SynapseFi:

  
const body = {
  logins: [
    {
      email: 'test@synapsefi.com'
    }
  ],
  phone_numbers: [
    '901.111.1111',
    'test@synapsefi.com'
  ],
  legal_names: [
    'Test User'
  ],
  ...
};

client.createUser(body);
  

This KYC process is a key part of why these three services offer so much more financial flexibility than Braintree and Stripe.

With Braintree and Stripe, “merchants” must be manually approved, whereas that application process is handled programmatically, by an API, with Sila, Dwolla, and SynapseFi.

UX, part 3 — Unverified Customers

A notable feature of Dwolla is their Unverified Customers user type, which doesn’t require the same level of KYC but also has more limitations.

Conclusion

If you’re a pre-seed startup, Sila is your solution. Even if you’re a bigger company, Sila has a highly scalable serverless architecture worth considering. Sila’s Co-Founder/CEO Sila Shamir Karkal was also the Co-Founder/CEO of a successful bank that’s been around for nine years and is still thriving. Keep your eyes on Sila — it’s gonna be big.

If you want to get to market ASAP and have no patience for unexpected/undocumented issues, try Dwolla.

If you need some prepackaged extravagant features like custom-made checks, SynapseFi is your API.