Des Moines-based payments platform Dwolla announced today that Dave Glaser has been appointed president and chief operating officer, bringing more than 20 years of experience in the enterprise payments space. Glaser’s first day with Dwolla was Monday.

Glaser most recently served as senior vice president of global acceptance solutions at Mastercard, leading new point-of-sale initiatives, acceptance products and services for acquirers and merchants. He previously held positions at Worldpay, leading that company’s IPO and a $10.4 billion merger with Vantiv, and at CyberSource, building the company’s global services division.

Glaser is the company’s first combined president and COO; previously, Charise Flynn served as Dwolla COO from 2012 to 2016 at a time when the company was supporting its consumer-facing mobile payments app. No other COO was named until Glaser joined this year.

The company is in the midst of raising a series C fundraising round, targeting about $50 million, and needed guidance from an experienced executive to help it navigate upcoming scaling, CEO Brady Harris told the Business Record.

“We realized that we were lacking some senior executive leadership on the operations side of the business,” Harris said. “It was really evident that we were going to be going through some serious stages of growth, and we needed to bring in some executives who had seen a scaling business before. The Holy Grail was a scaling executive with payments experience, and those are not always easy to find.”

Glaser, who has known Dwolla founder and board chairperson Ben Milne for a number of years, was introduced to Harris after Harris assumed the CEO role in early 2020. Dwolla currently supports more than $20 billion a year in gross payment volume, adding $5 billion in 2020 alone,  and began hiring again to expand company staffing in the second half of the year.

Glaser cited Dwolla’s ongoing work adapting the ACH payments platform for modern business needs and developing an upcoming real-time payments platform as examples of the startup’s potential for growth in the payments industry.

“With one system being modernized by Dwolla and the other system starting to be enabled by Dwolla, Dwolla itself is in an amazing precipice of things happening at the same time,” Glaser said. “I thought it would be really interesting to join with this team here and bring my experience in scaling large businesses to help them scale to the next level.”

Read more about Dave Glaser joining Dwolla in this Thursday’s edition of the innovationIOWA e-newsletter.