Not so long ago bankers feared that fintech insurgents like Dwolla wanted to turn FIs into “dumb pipes” moving money around while the fintechs would own the customer experience. Payments platform Dwolla, for one, has moved past wanting to own the customer.

“We’re happy to be the pipes,” CEO Ben Milne told Bank Innovation earlier this week.

Milne sat down with us to discuss his Des Moines-Iowa-based company’s move into white-labeled solutions for moving money, announced yesterday, but the conversation touched on a wide range of fintech topics, which offered a unique peek into how Milne thinks about the future of Dwolla and fintech.

Dwolla sits on the steering committee for the Federal Reserve’s faster payments initiative, and is one of the few participants to actually operate a real-time payments network, called FiSync. BBVA Compass was the inaugural bank partner to hook up to FiSync. More can be expected soon, Milne said. (The first FI in general to hook up to FiSync was Veridian Credit Union.)

The faster payments initiative is a plan to replace the nation’s aging (but reliable) ACH system, which employs batch processing and can take days to settle transactions. Milne described Dwolla’s network as a “better way” to do things, and certainly a faster one, but he pointed out that the ACH network remains an impressive system.

“It’s actually a technical marvel that our systems run on these machines,” he said, referring to the tangled network of servers throughout various buildings across the country on which the ACH network operates.

The Federal Reserve runs its own payments systems, but it has no interest in building a new faster payments rail, Milne said. This puts Dwolla in a potentially valuable position as a Faster Payments steering committee member already operating a, well, faster payments network, one that is working at a major bank.

Dwolla pricing for white-label payments for banks starts around $1,500 a month, which doesn’t sounds like a lot, considering that potentially billions of dollars can be running through it. (FiSync hookups cost more, and depend on the partnership, integration path, and other factors.) Milne acknowledged the low price, which is something of a signature of the company — Dwolla used to cost $0.25 for consumer transactions above $10. Now it is free for any amount. While some may question the viability of this business model (as we have), Milne pointed out that payment networks are already in a “race to the bottom”: “So we got there first,” he said, meaning free transactions. “A universal truth in fintech is that what works will be copied, and at a lower price.”

So revenue for Dwolla comes not from the transactions, which Milne compared to sending an email and said costs the company relatively little. Instead, revenue comes from the features built on top of the system, and Dwolla has a system of APIs to encourage an infrastructure around its pipes. One notable example is the Shift card, which uses the Dwolla API to let users spend their money in Dwolla by using card rails.

“There’s more revenue and more margin in features,” Milne said. Dwolla has received $32.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, and despite significant partnerships with major corporations, remains in part venture-funded.

Dwolla has moved slowly and carefully in its seven-year history– Milne the Insurgent now qualifies as an elder statesman in fintech.

“Everyone used to ask us, ‘How is Dwolla different than Revolution Money?'” he said. “Now no one knows what Revolution Money is.”

(The company was bought by American Express for $300 million in 2009.)

With its involvement in faster payments and its bank partnerships, Dwolla appears to be well-placed to play a major role in U.S. payments going forward. Referring to digital payments, Milne said, “The world in which we operate has a lot of opportunity in it.”

Dwolla may make strategic moves carefully, but it develops software and piles up code quickly, especially compared to traditional players in financial services.

“We plan in three-month increments and roll something out every single day,” Milne said. “We ask ourselves, ‘What’s the next big problem we can solve right now?’ We’re not done.”

This is the second of two articles on Dwolla. Read yesterday’s account of the company’s white-label payments solutions here.