Jodie Kelley, CEO of ETA, testified on the role of the payments industry in distributing stimulus funds
Jodie Kelley, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), testified before the House Financial Services Committee Task Force on Financial Technology on the role of the modern payments industry in delivering stimulus dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The unprecedented challenges caused by the pandemic have appropriately caused policymakers not only to move quickly to address the immediate crisis but also to ask how we can position ourselves to do even better in the future. And that is a particularly important question when it comes to those who are most vulnerable,” Kelley said. “When the CARES Act became law and state and federal policymakers began to look for ways to get stimulus money to consumers and businesses as quickly and securely as possible, ETA members immediately offered the tools of the modern payments industry to help to deliver stimulus money to Americans.”
In her written remarks, Kelley highlighted how the pandemic has brought a sharp focus on the importance of access to affordable and secure payments and financial services. Digital payments products are being deployed today to assist with the delivery of the (as of June 6) $266.8 billion in EIP and $511 billion in PPP, along with the $260 billion in unemployment insurance allocated under the CARES Act.
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For those Americans without a bank account, many of whom are among the most vulnerable, funds are being disbursed, in part, on general purpose reloadable prepaid cards (prepaid). Specifically, states are currently delivering the unemployment benefits expanded in the CARES Act electronically using prepaid cards. Additionally, the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration turned, in part, to two long-standing prepaid card programs – Direct Express and US Debit – to distribute over $9 billion in EIP’s to 5.7 million Americans.
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