The card infrastructure to pay constituents is already in place. The banks are ready. Your debit card is ready.
Consider the irony. Someone can Venmo $3,200 for a used couch they just bought at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, and the recipient can have the money in their bank account within minutes. But if the IRS owes you a tax refund, you might wait weeks and receive a paper check mailed to an address you have not lived at in two years. Bringing these payments fully into the digital age is a challenge, but one that can be met with the right mix of technology and ambition.
The rails for fast government payouts are not a future investment. They are already built. Debit cards linked to bank accounts sit in millions of wallets right now. Issuing banks are ready to receive transactions today. What is missing is not technology. It is the institutional will to stop printing checks.
Tax refunds. Disaster relief. Juror fees. Unclaimed property. These flows still crawl at paper speed because the procurement machinery, legacy systems and fragmented agency priorities have made inertia the path of least resistance.
As Curtis Webb, head of B2B strategic payment solutions at Visa Direct, put it: “[Constituents] need their money now.”
Webb was speaking with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in a conversation that felt more like a master class about how far behind government payments have fallen. Webster said according to research done with Visa Direct, 83% of constituents report needing access to money in real time. In that context, delivery delays aren’t administrative hiccups. They’re a measurable financial hit to households that are already running tight.
The Money Gap Nobody Talks About
Here’s something that doesn’t show up in policy briefs. The people waiting on government disbursements are the same people managing grocery bills on Wednesday when payday isn’t until Friday. They’re the same people using overdraft protection as a financial planning tool. A check that arrives in two weeks or does not arrive at all because it was mailed to the wrong address is not a minor inconvenience. It is a financial stress point.
Webb described this not as a payments problem but as a cash flow problem that payments could solve. The opportunity to modernize government disbursements is also an opportunity to make government action more directly felt in people’s financial lives. That opportunity is not an abstract one, but one felt in their actual bank accounts, the same day.
“It’s a massive opportunity to modernize payments,” Webb said.
His use of the word massive is not an understatement. Government agencies collectively move enormous sums through disbursements, refunds and reimbursements. The administrative lag embedded in those processes is equally enormous, a tax on the people least equipped to absorb it.
The Onion Nobody Wanted to Peel
Moving money faster should be simple.
Take unclaimed property, the funds states are holding on behalf of residents who have lost track of an old account or uncashed check. Before any of that money moves, it must survive identity verification, claim validation, account confirmation and jurisdictional review. In some states, it also requires a digital initiation that somehow still leads to a paper follow-up.
Yes, really.
“As we started to unpeel that onion, we learned that there’s all of these players that are involved,” Webb said.
There is also a rail confusion problem. Traditional payment methods such as ACH rely on batch processing, which can introduce delays, and require routing and account numbers that many consumers do not readily know or have on hand.
Card-based credentials are different, Webb said. Most people know where their debit card is. Fewer know their nine-digit routing number off the top of their head.
Then there are the physical checks still getting stolen out of mailboxes. Webb cited cases where intercepted checks triggered recovery efforts that cost more in time and resources than the original payments.
Every one of these incidents is a preventable failure that card-based payouts could eliminate.
Procurement: Where Good Ideas Go to Age Slowly
Federal momentum is real. There are active efforts at the national level to curtail check usage, and those signals are rippling outward to states and localities. The problem is that rippling outward is a polite description of what can be, in practice, a very slow drip.
Banking relationships differ. Legacy systems differ. Internal champions, or the lack of them, differ. And everywhere, procurement looms.
“Where things are going slowly” is in the procurement process, Webb said. Agencies face extended timelines to evaluate vendors, issue requests for proposals (RFPs) and actually deploy new capabilities. By the time a contract is awarded, the original urgency has often dissipated, replaced by the next competing priority.
One practical workaround gaining traction is collective purchasing arrangements. By letting agencies adopt solutions already vetted through competitive processes, these structures cut duplication and allow smaller jurisdictions to access capabilities and pricing negotiated by larger ones. It is not glamorous. But in a world of constrained budgets and overstretched procurement teams, it works.
‘You Can Get Started Tomorrow’
That is the line Webb came back to in his conversation with Webster. Not someday when the new system is built. Not after the migration project clears legal review. Tomorrow. Because the debit cards are already out there. The issuing banks are ready. The debit cards that constituents already carry in their physical and digital wallets are connected to the infrastructure needed to receive fast, secure payouts.
Webb said that Visa Direct’s argument is essentially this. The hardest infrastructure problem is already solved. What remains is organizational: getting agencies to use what is available, starting with the cases that are easiest to modernize first.
Juror payments. Tax refunds. Small-dollar reimbursements. These are the low-hanging fruit that are high-volume, relatively simple and affecting real people who would immediately feel the difference. Pilot there, build the operational confidence, then scale.
The Bigger Picture
Faster government payments are not just a constituent service improvement. They are an operational efficiency play, leading to fewer manual processes, lower fraud exposure and reduced administrative overhead. Resources that currently go into check printing, mailing, reconciling and recovering can go somewhere else.
Webb framed the endpoint simply: modernizing payments creates the opportunity to “provide those resources back to our communities.” That is the kind of sentence that sounds like a talking point but is not. The math is real. So is the urgency.
The rails are built. The banks are ready. The cards are in people’s wallets. The only thing left is deciding to use them.
Watch the full interview with Visa Direct’s Curtis Webb to learn more about:
- Why government payments are moving on from the check era.
- How card-based payouts can speed tax refunds, relief payments and reimbursements.
- What is slowing agencies from adopting real-time disbursements.
