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Disrupting EBT

Disrupting EBT

The world of technology is undergoing unprecedented disruption across multiple industries and has not only changed the ways we have traditionally conducted business, but how we look at business as well.  From Airbnb to Amazon, from Uber to Zelle, technology and creative thinking have disrupted the status quo and created market efficiencies.

There is a great meme on the Internet with a picture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 1998 looking more than slightly nerdy and computer geeky, with his receding hairline and goofy smile, wearing an ill-fitting brown sweater and saying “I am Jeff Bezos and I sell books”; to a pic in 2017 where the same Jeff Bezos, nearly unrecognizable from the 1998 pic, with a shaved head, cool sunglasses, the requisite down vest and golf shirt showing off his biceps, seemingly channeling Vin Diesel and saying  “I am Jeff Bezos and I sell whatever I want.”

 Getting there required not only technology but vision, guts and a willingness to look at something completely differently.  The question The Lobster is exploring here is whether we can we bring these factors together to bring about a needed disruption in EBT?

Do EBT professionals have that Bezos vision, guts and willingness to disrupt established methodologies or would we rather rest on our laurels having invented a new payment system some 35 years ago.

Prior to WIC EBT, the last significant disruption in EBT was the Congressional mandate that all state EBT systems be interoperable with each other. Congress issued this directive in 1999, 16 years after the dawn of EBT technology.

The use of electronic benefits transfer for the distribution of government benefits dates back to 1983. EBT has been one of the most successful public-private partnerships in American government history. But it is clearly an industry that at times focuses on what a good job we have done at the expense of looking objectively at how we can do better.

It seems that an opportunity to look forward is before us.  Mobile payments, smart phones, big data and blockchain all seem to have elements that could be brought to bear in EBT.

 Can we challenge our assumptions?  The prevailing assumption underlying EBT has been that we measure success by the number of people on our EBT systems.  But a growing counter assumption holds that we can quantify success by a decline in those numbers as program benefits relieve economic pressure on beneficiaries and allows them to seek employment and no longer need the benefits that EBT delivers.

Along these lines, the Trump Administration has proposed plans to convert a portion of each eligible household’s monthly benefit to what it dubbed “America’s Harvest Box.” The box would contain shelf-stable food products.

Whether it is good or bad, the Harvest Box concept is a disruption in our thinking about food delivery.  Opposition to the plan was swift and strong and failed to appreciate the new and creative thinking that went into the proposal or the fact that after 35 years technology has passed us by and that EBT is a market more than ready for disruption.  The question becomes what might that disruption look like?  And, do we need to change fundamental assumptions in order to make it happen?