- Key insights: Payment fintech NMI agreed to acquire fellow payment fintech Dwolla.
- What's at stake: The deal will boost account-to-account payments, an increasingly popular way for merchants to avoid card fees.
- Forward look: Dwolla's management will join NMI, and will help lead the addition of Dwolla's developer tools with NMI's payment technology.
NMI on Tuesday agreed to acquire Dwolla, a payments-focused fintech that has A2A technology as part of its toolkit. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal is designed to add distribution for a range of payment types, but will have an initial focus on the intersection of A2A payments and real-time processing. A2A payments, also referred to as "pay by bank," are on the rise. Global A2A transactions totalled $91.5 trillion in 2025 and are on pace to reach $195 trillion by 2030, according to Juniper Research.
"We've been focused on moving up market, to bring A2A to mid to large enterprises that want to modernize their platforms," Dave Glaser, CEO of Dwolla, told American Banker.
The deal
Dwolla's Glaser will join NMI's executive leadership team as chief operating officer as a way to support continuity for Dwolla customers, partners and employees while helping lead the integration of Dwolla's capabilities into NMI's embedded payments platform. Embedded payments refers to enabling checkout directly in a merchant's shopping experience, without requiring navigation to a separate payment page, and are a key use case for A2A transactions.
"The acquisition gives us a sophisticated A2A flow that allows us to embed NMI's platform in a way we could not in the past," Steve Pinado, CEO of NMI, told American Banker
The acquisition combines NMI's mix of payment acceptance, onboarding and merchant services with Dwolla's application programming interfaces that support A2A payments, real-time processing and open banking. Dwolla's 400 existing clients will be added to NMI's white label payment platform.
"With NMI we can move deeper into international processing, we can bring in more businesses that are using A2A payments," Glaser said.
NMI processes more than $600 billion annually, and has about 6,000 clients that include banks, SaaS platforms, independent sales organizations and payment facilitators that use NMI's systems to support in-app, in-store and mobile payments.
The Dwolla acquisition is the latest in a series of moves that NMI has made to expand its payments technology. NMI in December launched
With the Dwolla addition, "We'll [also] be able to participate in the next generation of money movement, including agentic payments, stablecoin-enabled settlement, remittances and other emerging payments," Pinado said. "We can help our partners deliver more choice, flexibility and control over how money moves through one single platform."
Why A2A?
A2A payments refer to moving transactions directly between bank accounts, such as between a consumer and a merchant. A2A payments do not require a card, and as such enable the parties in a transaction to avoid interchange fees.
The product has attracted large payments and technology firms.
And while A2A is a card alternative, Visa and Mastercard have aggressively invested in A2A technology to capture revenue from transactions that do not use credit cards.
Among fintechs,
The NMI/Dwolla deal "is an important step in mainstreaming the use of A2A rails in e-commerce," Aaron McPherson, principal at AFM Consulting, told American Banker. "NMI already supports cards, so this adds FedNow and ACH to its list of supported payment methods. This is an opportunity for banks to expand utilization of their FedNow investments, although it may put some pressure on the card side of things. Still, they can make some of that revenue back by charging for instant settlement."
