Dwolla Connect Glossary Definitions #

1. Account / Main Account: A Dwolla Connect account that is created when you register on the Dwolla website.

2. External Party: A type of Dwolla account, either business or personal, that identifies your end-users. An External Party is required in order to initiate a transfer to a customer’s bank account.

3. Funding Source: A linked bank account that can be used to route funds to a Dwolla Account or External Party, denoted by the use of an account and routing number, most often connected to a checking or savings account.

4. Treasury Account: An identifiable “connection” between Dwolla and a supported Treasury Partner, identified by your ACH Company ID or Gateway Company ID, depending on the banking institution.

5. Treasury Partner: A banking institution that Dwolla has partnered with, and implemented a solution for, that can be “connected” via Treasury Accounts in order to create transfers to External Parties.

6. API Key & Secret: A pair of randomly generated, unique strings that, when paired together, individually identify and authorize your application with Dwolla in order to make API requests. Connect clients have an API key that is suffixed with dwolla.connect.

7. Client ID & Secret: See API Key & Secret.

8. Access (OAuth) Token: A unique, short-lived token that is used to authenticate and authorize your application when making API requests to restricted endpoints. An access token is generated by Dwolla and subsequently passed in the Authorization header of future HTTP requests.

9. OpenAPI Specification: A standard, language-agnostic interface description for HTTP/REST APIs, making it easy for computers and humans to understand what a service can do, without requiring access to the source code, and can be combined with additional tooling, such as generating documentation, a Postman collection, or a Software Development Kit.

10. Postman Collection: A group of saved API requests, organized by category, that is often used to better understand the request and response structure of endpoints, as well as to automate API documentation and testing.

11. Production Environment: The live environment where Dwolla applications are deployed and used by real users. As real banking and user information is used in this environment, it is recommended to test your application’s integration with Dwolla in our sandbox environment first.

12. Sandbox Environment: A full-featured replica of Dwolla’s production environment, as well as our banking partners, supporting all the same API endpoints, while not using real banking or user data. Applications should be tested against Dwolla’s sandbox environment first before deploying to production to ensure that all features and functionality work as expected before handling live user data.