Digital Money Movement Overview

Digital Money Movement lets you send funds to people programmatically, without opening an account
for them first. You call an API, and money is pushed in near real-time to the debit card the
recipient already carries.

The goal is to automate payouts at scale. Manual methods like checks and one-off bill payments work
for the occasional payment, but they break down when you need to send large volumes of irregular
payments to different people, in different amounts, at different times. Digital Money Movement
replaces that effort with API-driven payouts: you define the rules, and funds reach each recipient
electronically.

Which documentation set applies to you

Green Dot publishes two integration paths. Which one you use depends on whether your recipients
need an account.

Both build on the same platform and share core integration patterns, including authentication and
encryption.

What you can do

• Push funds to a known group of recipients automatically through APIs.
• Deliver funds in near real-time, 24/7, to eligible debit cards.
• Choose the integration flow that suits your program: store recipients and pay them repeatedly,
  or send each payout in a single asynchronous call.
• Operate at high volume, with every payout driven by your own business rules.
• Build on Green Dot Bank's banking, security, and program-management services.

Where Digital Money Movement fits

Digital Money Movement is a capability of Green Dot's Arc platform. You can adopt it as a
standalone solution — it does not require any other product, and the platform provides the banking
and program-management services a payouts program needs.

Because the capability is defined by the money movement rather than by the industry using it, the
same integration supports very different programs. A payroll platform, a marketplace, and an
insurance carrier all make the same calls; only their business logic differs. See
Use Cases for the scenarios partners run today.

Roles and responsibilities

The guiding principle is simple: you own the business logic, and Green Dot moves the money.
Your platform decides who gets paid, how much, and when. Green Dot executes each payout and
provides the regulated banking and money-movement infrastructure behind it — so you do not have to
hold licenses, build compliance programs, or integrate directly with the payment networks yourself.

What stays your responsibility

Digital Money Movement moves the money; it does not decide who receives it. Eligibility, amounts,
and timing are determined by your application's business logic. Keeping that boundary clear is the
key to a smooth integration.

How a payout works, end to end

Every payout follows the same shape:

1. Fund your disbursement account. Payouts are pushed from a funded business account at Green
   Dot Bank. You keep a sufficient balance available to cover the payments you intend to initiate.
   This is set up with your Green Dot onboarding team before you write any code — see
   Before You Begin.
2. Identify the recipient. Collect enough information to identify the person you are paying.
3. Provide the recipient's debit card. Collected through a PCI-compliant channel and encrypted
   before it reaches Green Dot.
4. Initiate the payout and track it. Send the disbursement, then follow its status through to
   completion.

Steps 2 through 4 can be three API calls or one, depending on which flow you choose. See
Choosing an integration flow.

Handling volume

Digital Money Movement is built for high volume. Payouts are initiated individually rather than as
a single bulk request, so to pay many recipients you run your own process that iterates through
your list and initiates one payout per recipient. This keeps each payout independently trackable
while still supporting large volumes.

Where to go next