If you follow these things, you’ve probably heard about the Treasury’s new (if uncompellingly named) MyAccountCard pilot.  Issued by soon-to-be Green Dot’s Bonneville Bank, managed by Green Dot, the US Treasury will send these GPR cards to 600,000 underbanked households, suggesting they use the card to receive their tax refunds.  ADP will manage some payroll cards, as part of the pilot.

This strikes me as Good, all around.  The program will save the Treasury – aka the tax payer – around $40mm simply by not needing to cut paper checks.  The program partners with the private sector in good ways and at a decent scale.  The program is experimental and transcends the long-standing attitude that everyone should be traditionally banked, in other words, it’s customer centric (or citizen centric).

This Treasury is doing quite a few new and innovative programs.  For an agency publicly maligned with big-bank stimulus, government-sponsored R&D has gotten a bad name.  But I don’t see a lot of people complaining about government investment in health R&D or energy R&D or science R&D.  These are programs which flow billions in home-grown innovation into our private sector.  Experiments like this Treasury taxtime prepaid card are in this vein and I hope we see a lot more of it.

(And by the way, this program was conceived of and developed for the Treasury by my friends at CFSI under the no more compellingly named SAFE-T Account moniker).