Are you Paying It Green?

A recent email from WACHA quotes interesting stats from NACHA:

• Almost 22 million employed Americans still don't have access to Direct Deposit for their pay. According to PayItGreen, if those employees used Direct Deposit, annually we would save 8.7 million pounds of paper and avoid releasing 25 million pounds of greenhouse gases into the environment. April has been established as PayItGreen Month to coincide with Earth Day, which in celebrated this year on April 22.

The PayItGreen Alliance is a coalition of financial services companies, led by NACHA — The Electronic Payments Association, committed to educating consumers and businesses about the positive environmental impact of choosing electronic payments, bills and statements instead of paper. These facts are the result of a study commissioned this year by PayItGreen on the "positive environmental impact of getting paid electronically by Direct Deposit."

WACHA's email notes that "...although most large companies offer Direct Deposit for payroll, there are still opportunities for them to increase participation from their employees. Even small- and medium-sized businesses can reduce their carbon footprints by paying their employees via Direct Deposit instead of by paper check. If a business that employs just 300 people and issues paychecks every two weeks switched to Direct Deposit, it would save 121 pounds of paper and avoid the release of 346 pounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in one year."

You can check out the environmental impact of your own business by using the Direct Deposit Environmental Calculator on www.payitgreen.org.

"What large and small companies don't realize is that by offering Direct Deposit and maximizing participation, they not only are helping to save the environment, they are also saving their companies significant money," said Angela Ceccarelli, vice president of marketing for HSBC Payments and Cash Management in New York, and a spokesperson for PayItGreen.

Directo payroll cards can help your business achieve total direct deposit, by allowing all employees to participate, regardless of credit history or "bankability." Use Directo's online payroll savings calculator to see how much your company can save.

Businesses can go beyond direct deposit by paying bills electronically, and by switching to electronic bills and statments, all of which an also be used by consumers. To help customers increase their savings, Directo now offers electronic paystubs. Find out more - send an email to Jim McCarthy (jmccarthy@directo.net).

Privacy and Direct Deposit

By now, most companies are aware that a direct deposit program can cut their payroll costs significantly. It's tough to convince some employees to participate. Rumors abound about how evil companies can siphon cash out of the unwary employee's account, causing some to hold tight to their paycheck-cashing ways. Others love to receive their paycheck out of long habit, or as one worker told us, because he felt that his hard work was validated when his supervisor looked him in the eye and handed over the paycheck. He soon felt just as validated when his bank account received a deposit on payday, and he didn't have to visit the bank on his thirty minute lunch break.

It surprises some in the payroll and HR departments when a direct deposit mandate suddenly reduces paychecks by as much as seventy-five percent, all from employees who had bank accounts but weren't willing to participate in direct deposit. Directo paycards can fill in the gap for the remaining workers who cannot get a bank account due to bad credit and other reasons. Many times, employees with privacy concerns opt to open a Directo account to receive their direct deposit pay, even if they already have an account with another bank. Directo never checks credit, and statements are online, so there's never correspondence with the account number in the employee's mailbox.

If you want to increase direct deposit participation, a Directo paycard program will make an immediate, successful impact on your bottom line!

Need to reduce debt? Directo's paycard can help.

Directo payroll cards can be an important tool for reducing debt. By signing up for direct deposit, money is in the bank on payday, rather than cashed, removing the temptation for unplanned spending. Billpay can be done automatically, saving money and time.

For those working on debt reduction using a plan such as the Dave Ramsey program, the paycard account will prove valuable as credit card or loan's monthly balance shrink, the minimum paid along with the extra amount gained from the snowball.

If you or your employees already have bank accounts, consider opening a low cost, secure Directo paycard account to manage your money as you go through the debt reduction program. From stashing $1000 away for emergencies to paying down creditors, Directo will be there every step of the way, ready to answer questions and provide help. Your money is safe with us, and now you can watch it grow. Learn more at www.directocard.com.

Direct Deposit/Banking Service for Spanish Speakers

By Ferney Colorado & Melissa Burkhart

Many employers and HR managers have long noted with great frustration that their Spanish-speaking employees tend to be very reluctant to sign up for direct deposit of their paychecks. The advantages to an employer of having at least the majority of their staff on a direct-deposit system are considerable---greatly reduced costs for paper products, improved efficiency in payroll departments, greatly reduced chaos on payday, etc.

While these are very significant issues to many companies, the growing risk of check fraud makes it yet much more urgent for companies to find a direct deposit program that will meet the needs of all employees. Unfortunately, check fraud is relatively easy to commit, especially when employees cash their checks at smaller venues, like check-cashing operations or liquor stores. A common practice is for several people to present forged payroll checks at a local bank and attempt to get them cashed. It is easy enough to make forged copies of a legitimate paycheck and them and then modify only so that they will correspond with false identification.

Because of the volume of transactions that banks and check-cashing outlets process daily, as well the limited resources available for training bank personnel to recognize the latest fraud techniques, preventing this crime can be extremely difficult. Therefore, a growing number of banks make the effort to protect themselves from payroll check fraud by making it difficult or expensive for the individual to cash checks. This practice obliges ‘unbanked’ workers to cash checks at ‘fringe’ financial services outlets, liquor stores and the like---which can expose employers to increased risk that the fraud will occur in the first place.

For company management, it is very easy to see that a direct deposit program that serves and meets the needs of immigrant or transient workers is the ideal solution. Fortunately, Directo, an Atlanta-based company, has introduced a low-risk direct deposit program that is customized specifically for unbankable workers. Furthermore, Directo has gone to great lengths to bring foreign workers on board with this concept. Directo is aware that workers from Latin America in particular have a great mistrust of financial institutions and a strong preference for saving and spending money in cash. This is a result in part of economic instability in many Latin American countries. Spanish speakers will be very reluctant to trust a paper statement telling them their account balance and would far prefer to determine their own balance by counting bills in their hand. Often this mistrust is so strong that even those Spanish speakers who are eligible for a bank account will choose not to have one.

To assuage these doubts, Directo starts by providing literature, training, and customer service in Spanish. They also consult with Futuro Sólido USA http://www.futurosolidousa.com/ as to the best communication strategies for laying to rest Spanish speakers’ typical fears and misconceptions. With such a clear, concrete, multi-step, roll-out process, both companies and their employees are very happy to find that they can achieve significant savings and greatly enhanced security with Directo’s program.

The advantages of Directo---for both business owners and employees speak for themselves. Some of them are:

For Business Owners

Eliminates the risk of exposing the company corporate account number in environments where it might be vulnerable, such as check cashing outlets, which gain access to the bank account number.
Eliminates the risk of overdrafts because the company controls when the payments will be distributed
Eliminates the all-too-frequent chaos on payday, when employees often attempt to end a work day early, crowd into the office to receive their checks, and rush to the check-cashing establishment before it closes
Increases the company’s efficiency by eliminating lost checks or paper check production and administration.

For Employees
Greatly reduces the risk of loss from theft since many unbanked workers carry large amounts of cash on their person and accumulate their savings in cash at home
Eliminates the cost, as well as the time, associated with cashing checks
Increases access to the privileges, safety, security, convenience and other benefits enjoyed by banked workers
Greatly reduces the cost of sending money to family members in their country of origin, as Directo cards are used internationally at ATM's and this transaction is offered for a very modest flat fee---rather than a percentage of the amount being transferred

Furthermore, by sending money to their home countries by traditional means, immigrant workers also face potential fraud themselves that their employers are entirely unaware of. Many express concern that the personnel at the establishment where their wives or mothers are to pick up their cash will not be able to resist the temptation to pocket a bit of it. Once enrolled in this service, these workers enjoy the automated system that guarantees that the family they are supporting in their home country will receive exactly the right amount of money, according to the most current exchange rate.

Programs like Directo enhance a company’s benefit package at no cost whatsoever to the employer. Furthermore, when a company provides a system that so clearly has been customized to meet the specific needs of immigrant workers, those workers sit up and take notice. Their impression (although usually incorrect) of benefits in general is that these packages are not designed to meet their needs---but rather the needs only of the company and of those employees who were born and raised in this country. A service like this will go a long way towards demonstrating to them that this is not at all the case.

Ferney Colorado and Melissa Burkhart are dedicated to provide understanding and value of benefits programs for Spanish speaking workers. For more see http://www.futurosolidousa.com/.

Directo is a leading provider of payroll cards for the unbanked worker. Founded on the notion that there is a better way for Spanish speakers to receive and keep their hard earned pay, Directo celebrated its 10 year annivesary in November of 2008. http://www.directocard.com/