Nearly 6 million US households are “unbanked,” making it crucial for governments and corporations to pay people in innovative ways.  

BNY Mellon is teaming up with fintech MoCaFi to help serve people without bank accounts or who have limited access to financial services. These communities are often low-income, under-educated, Black, or Hispanic, and blame minimum balance requirements, or trust and privacy issues, as the main reasons for not having accounts.  

The bank’s Treasury Services arm will integrate MoCaFi’s technology to allow its clients to pay people through the fintech’s digital disbursement platform, which includes prepaid, no-fee debit cards, FDIC-insured bank accounts, a money management app, and more.  

“The inability to provide digital payments to a significant portion of the US economy has been a major hurdle for both public and private sectors,” Treasury Services CEO Jennifer Barker said. “Through our commitment to innovation, we met this challenge head on and are thrilled to join forces with a fintech doing outstanding, tangible work in our communities.   

For example, a large grocery store chain may have a significant percentage of workers without bank accounts who can be paid through MoCaFi, while a government may want to better distribute disaster relief funds.    

“MoCaFi first connected with BNY through an introduction to Robin Vince, BNY Mellon’s CEO,” founder Wole Coaxum told Insights Distilled. “The collaboration was borne out of an opportunity that BNY saw to reflect its broader commitment to financial inclusion, helping to connect unbanked and underbanked individuals and communities to high-quality financial services.” 

The MoCaFi integration is part of BNY Mellon’s Vaia payments platform, which it launched last fall, and which can also help its clients ditch paper checks in favor of real-time payments options.