Impactica Financial ID

Impactica is building the first digital benefits assistant to help provide anyone in the United States personalized assistance to apply for public benefits programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. Think of it as virtual caseworker in your pocket. Our mission is to ensure everyone has access to the services they need and don't face interruptions to benefits due to failure to provide timely updates of financial documents for verification or recertification.

Today, people struggle to understand what programs are available to them and whether or not they are eligible. The most common reason applications aren't completed is due to the challenges people have compiling and submitting necessary financial documents. Long applications and recertification notices can be a source of stress and anxiety and adapting to changes in the household or income can make it difficult to understand how this will affect ongoing eligibility for programs.

Unfortunately, these barriers result in millions of people failing to access essential services they are perfectly qualified for, leaving over 80 billion dollars in benefits on the table. 

The problem begins with the silo nature of various programs, all requiring similar proof of identity, employment and finances but with separate disparate processes, managed by separate agencies within a state. This results in what the current administration has deemed " a time tax" on the most vulnerable members of our communities. 

Impactica offers a mobile-first application for individuals to gather data and documents needed to apply for public benefits programs. This configurable application can be offered by nonprofits, providers or government agencies as a resource to improve understanding of eligibility and vastly reduce the time and effort necessary to complete applications for programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, LIHEAP, and the Affordable Connectivity Program. By providing a tool that centralizes program information and eligibility, a secure service to manage financial information and documents, and the means to coordinate consented data sharing with organizations and providers, Impactica's objectives are to make it significantly easier for individuals to access vital benefits and to reduce churn out of programs in order to ensure the most vulnerable communities improve their financial security.

We have developed Impactica's Financial ID solution in coordination with nonprofits serving a diverse range of communities to improve access to vital benefits. Access to public benefits is subject to politics, both real and perceived, and we treat the dignity and agency of all individuals using our platform as paramount. In pursuit of this, we've emphasized accessibility and human-centered design in Impactica's applications which are flexible enough to be adapted to address the needs of a broad range of communities. Throughout the application, plain language is used to explain programs, eligibility requirements, consent requests, privacy, security measures, and how to access help and support. We provide natural, intuitive navigational flows and clear calls to action, multi-language capabilities, visual accessibility support, and configurable design components. Impactica's applications are built to be ADA and Section 504 compliant ensuring a broad range of people can more easily access benefits application assistance.

From growing up in the post industrial Midwest to moving to the United States as young children, our team has experienced first hand the necessity of access to public benefits programs to prevent our families from financial instability to due times of acute financial need. Seeing these processes not change and adapt to how people access information and the data available to them in the age of the internet is a scenario our founding team has been navigating for enterprises for several decades. Seeing the nonprofit sector's underinvestment in technology bare itself at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic motivated our team to build technologies that have been widely adopted in the private sector to improve service delivery by nonprofits of any size. From past experiences with payments and big data, we are confident we are able to leverage the best of today's fintech in order to make our customers better at serving their communities with the platforms and services like Financial ID Impactica Labs is slated to launch over the next 18 months.

We've architected our infrastructure and designed our user-facing with development beginning in March of 2023. Working with our development teams and with the assistance of Amazon AWS, we've been able to develop our network architecture to provide Impactica Financial ID for our first customer in the end of Q3 2023. Employing a civic-tech focused design agency, we've created views for our applicant-facing tools and our organization coordination enablement dashboard. While not complete, we are proceeding with development with an expected launch date in the beginning of the fall of 2023.

Currently none, but we are in the process of coordinating a pilot project for the fall of 2023 with a large national nonprofit to demonstrate the value of our solutions for their enrollment assistance providers through 2024.

Impactica Financial ID would benefit from pilots and tests that have the opportunity to be studied and analyzed in coordination with academic institutions and policy makers. By acting as a conduit between the public, community organizations, managed care providers and state agencies and institutions, we need resources and a network to enable our solution to be validated as an optimization and of currently antiquated systems

To date, assistance with benefits access has been facilitated by telephone and postal outreach, with follow ups and one-on-one assistance being extremely labor intensive and time consuming. While email and text notifications have improved outreach efforts, processes related to actual application assistance are still highly manual. Our objective is to provide a solution anyone in the public can utilize to address their needs through better understanding and a simplified process for navigating applications. We wish to enable not just the individual, but the organizations providing outreach and application support tools being utilized broadly by the financial sector to enable the same verification capabilities but in the context of improving access to benefits such as SNAP, WIC and Medicaid. 

Our objectives include enabling any size of community based organization or nonprofit to be able to utilize our Financial ID tool to expand their capacity to serve more people application assistance. In addition, we hope to launch within the calendar year a free to use Financial ID tool for any individual to use independently that over the next few years expands coverage to all 50 states. In doing this, we seek to improve enrollment and recertification rates among vulnerable communities by removing barriers in the application and financial attestation processes that encumber the majority of programs today across 50 states. 

We have three key metrics to measure the impact of our organizational objectives. First, with the consent of users and partner organizations, we will track the number of completed applications and cross enrollments into public benefits programs. Second, through correspondence and surveys, we will track how often users and partner organizations were able to successfully utilize Financial ID files to respond to verification and recertification notices for enrolled individuals. Third and finally, we are developing what we call a Financial Health Score, comprised of an individual household's financial data, that will reflect the impact access to benefits has had on a households financial well-being, ability to save, earnings and expenses related to health. 

Our solution begins with data. Today, especially with individual consent, there is a greater amount of accurate, real-time financial data available for use to create a complete financial snapshot necessary for loans, credit decisions and insurance products. This same information comprises the data necessary to complete benefits applications, a step that is frequently the stumbling block of most applicants because of the siloed nature of this information requiring a significant amount of time gathering necessary documents and aggregating information. We are confident that by providing individuals and those that assist them with applications with readily sorted financial data and documentations for the purpose of benefits access will increase enrollment in public benefits programs, ensure continuity of services by improving response rates to recertification/verification requests, and reduce churn out of programs. Ultimately, most incomplete applications and  churn of eligible individuals today is due to failure to complete the documentation necessary which requires a manual process of mailing, emailing or taking pictures of documents to provide to the state, which in turn requires massive resources to process and decision applications in an equitable fashion. By making data and documentation aggregation easier for applicants, in turn, this will lead to less backlogs at state agencies due to incomplete applications and unreturned requests for verification. Growth in cross-enrollment in programs such as SNAP, WIC and Medicaid has been correlated with improved financial security, health, and educational outcomes for children and our platform drives that trend forward by removing barriers for both applicants and institutions.

As a cloud-based service, Impactica's Financial ID leverages serverless technology to provide individuals and organizations a personalized and secure experience. Today, open finance is the term used to describe user-consented data services that enable direct connections to data from banks, employers, payroll platforms and government systems. Impactica leverages some of the largest open finance platforms through unique partnerships forged specifically to deliver the Financial ID service. In order to deliver a seamless user experience and coordination with partner nonprofit organizations, Impactica has adopted a mobile-first orientation to ensure all tools are accessible from any internet-connected device and browser. We utilize SMS and voice for both communications and security features. 

Among leadership we have one immigrant and one First Generation American and as a team we come from a diverse set of economic, social and cultural backgrounds. From settling in the United States as children to transient working-class upbringings in the Midwest, we have learned first hand the value of a team composed of individuals informed by different experiences and lives in the United States and abroad.

Impactica offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform/API usage model with an initial setup fee for nonprofits, benefits navigators and MCOs. Depending on the type of organization and size, our monthly or annual billing arrangements can be tailored to meet existing or new budgets for providing application assistance and enrollment services. Applicants do not incur any costs for using Impactica Financial ID.

Impactica Labs has been self-funded to date by its founders. Because we have been able to leverage infrastructure and services built for massive scale in developing our Financial ID data platform, our costs will remain low relative to revenues as Impactica Labs launches beyond its initial customer. We expect to pursue both institutional investors and philanthropic support in Q3 of 2023.

While we have been self-funded to date, we have been encouraged by the commitments made to us by our development partners, technology partners such as Amazon AWS, Stripe, Plaid, and Pinwheel to help us build a sustainable business model in order to create this essential service. While we have not applied for grants yet and are yet to generate revenue, we expect our first nonprofit customer to help not only launch our service to the public, but to serve as beginning of a long term co-marketing effort to ensure similar organizations are utilizing the data tools we've opened to the nonprofit sector focused on benefits access.