Drop-in Components: Introducing Our Low-Code Payment Integration

Published in

Dwolla

4 min readDec 9, 2020

At Dwolla, our mission is to empower innovators to change the world through a modern payments platform that is flexible, reliable and easy to use. While our API allows a business to start transacting relatively quickly, we are never done.

For any engineering team, integrating with a new API can be a challenge. Not only do you have to learn the ins and outs of the API with which you’re integrating, but you also have to worry about creating a great user experience. Often, payments are not core to your business and you likely just want to integrate as quickly as possible so that you are free to focus on the core functionality of your application.

Drop-in Components, our new low-code offering, makes integrating with Dwolla’s payment API as simple and fast as moving money with it.

These pre-built UI components let us handle the minutiae of the payments experience while you focus on building your application.

To accomplish that, we’ve worked tirelessly so that these low-code components can be nearly copy and pasted into your solution. Each component includes HTML, CSS and JavaScript that developers can drop-in and customize to fit the look and feel of their application.

Our partners at We Write Code, a Systems Integrator in our Partner Ecosystem, got an early start using these drop-in components and shared with us the massive time savings they anticipated:

“When the Dwolla team showed us the drop-in component for document upload, we were confident we could implement that into an application in one afternoon. Without the drop-in component, that likely would have taken one of our engineers five days worth of work.”

Low-Code Examples

Low-code is an approach to shortening the software development lifecycle by abstracting and automating many of the steps involved in creating software.

Speed to market is essential when launching a business, as is an excellent customer experience. Now, with a new client-token and a few of our UI components, developers with varying levels of experience can access the Dwolla Platform, create a customer and start moving money in minutes — instead of days. Our low-code solutions allow you to short-cut your Dwolla integration.

Today, we’re releasing five UI components all designed to reduce development time and offer a low-code payment integration.

We chose to develop each of these low-code components to shorten integration time, based on feedback from Dwolla, our API Clients and members of the developer community. Each of our new drop-in components helps you implement functionality that’s required to pass our go-live review, simplifies complex flows or reduces the amount of sensitive information hitting your servers.

Currently, the five drop-in components we have in general availability are:

If speed is a priority and your team is looking for a low-code payment integration, our ‘Create Customer’, ‘Document Upload’ and ‘Balance Display’ components will help you satisfy more than a handful of the development requirements and save you weeks of development time.

If your team is concerned about sensitive information hitting your servers (or you just don’t want to build out an image upload flow), the ‘Document Upload’ and ‘Upgrade Customer’ components will send the sensitive data straight to us.

When built from scratch, creating a verified customer and handling the retry or document states can be a cumbersome process. It can consist of multiple API calls and building the UI to handle the responses. With our ‘Personal VCR Flow’ component, the same experience can now be built quickly with much of the complexity removed.

Create Customer: Create an Unverified Customer

<dwolla-customer-create></dwolla-customer-create>

Document Upload: Upload a Customer Documents

<dwolla-document-upload></dwolla-document-upload>

Upgrade Customer: Upgrade a Customer From Unverified to Verified

<dwolla-customer-update></dwolla-customer-update>

Balance Display: Display a Verified Customer’s Balance

<dwolla-balance-display></dwolla-balance-display>

Personal VCR Flow: Create a Verified Customer and Handle the Retry and Document States

<dwolla-personal-vcr></dwolla-personal-vcr>

With just a few lines of code, leverage our vast knowledge in payments and create a seamless payments experience with a low-code payment platform.

We have always operated under the belief that moving money should be fast and it should be easy. Unfortunately, the development process rarely is.

With the introduction of Dwolla’s Drop-in components, we’re changing that.

As your team begins to implement Dwolla’s Drop-in Components into your own application, we would love to get your feedback and ideas on what components to build next.