Introducing Lithic Send: Flexible Solutions for Card Disbursement Programs

Today, we’re launching Lithic Send – a new suite of products designed for companies that need a faster, more flexible way to build out card disbursement programs. Using Lithic Send, you can create custom payout solutions for a wide range of use cases with fewer resources and partnerships, and on a much faster timeline.

Normally, creating a custom disbursement program involves integrating with multiple vendors, mapping the card transaction lifecycle to an external ledger, and creating custom logic to bring the program to market — a process that can easily take months of development.

Lithic Send shortens that implementation timeline from months to weeks or even days. To achieve this, we’re releasing new features such as account opening, account funding, native ledger, and transaction and balance tracking. We’ve also streamlined our internal operations to make the implementation process as efficient as possible.

Customers are using Lithic Send to build:

• Payout solutions for class action settlements, clinical trials, and insurance claims
• Payroll and Earned Wage Access solutions for 1099 workers, on-demand delivery startups, and gig-economy marketplaces
• Corporate incentive programs for customer and employee loyalty, wellness, and rewards

How is this different from the disbursement capabilities we’ve always offered?

It comes down to flexibility and speed.

Customers should have a range of options to choose from when it comes to building their products. Every use case is different, so you always need some degree of customization. However, when you look at the options available today, customers typically have to choose between a turnkey solution for a narrow range of use cases and the white-glove customized offerings that come with 6-18 month timelines and require at least $500K to launch due to setup costs, vendor contracts, and bank minimums.

Lithic Send breaks this “either/or” model with flexible build options.

If you need a fully productized offering that works for a range of use cases off the shelf, you can have that. If you prefer to use our APIs to solve edge cases that other platforms can’t or won’t support, you can do that too. You can even use a mix of both and only customize certain aspects of your card program.

Whatever your use case, Lithic’s modular infrastructure will help you build card programs that range from simple to sophisticated.

How does Lithic Send work to deliver speed and flexibility?

Lithic Send lets you directly interact with our native ledger so you can monitor your virtual bank account balances and move funds between your accounts. With a single API call, you can move funds from your program's account to an end-user's account and see the balances update in real-time. These balances can then be spent by your end users using custom virtual or physical cards, and you have the ability to control how and where those funds are spent.

All of this can now happen within Lithic's platform.

Previously, if a customer wanted to do this they’d have to either integrate multiple services or use a third-party turnkey solution. While these options have their merit, they’re not the right options for everyone. Integrating multiple partners requires you to invest more time, money, and engineering resources. And with turnkey solutions, you have less flexibility because the provider hosts and sets the disbursement experience for the end user.

If speed and flexibility are important to you, these other options may not meet your needs. Lithic Send offers the best of both worlds:

• Speed: Because Lithic Send moves money within Lithic's platform, end users can receive their funds instantly. In contrast, other solutions rely on external payment rails like ACH to disburse funds to end users, which means it can take 2-3 business days for end users to receive their funds.
  
• Flexibility: Lithic Send is also an end-to-end solution for disbursements, so customers only need to do a single integration. But unlike other turnkey solutions, you can still create a custom disbursement experience within your own product. Using our APIs, you can incorporate balance displays or statements into your product, customize the virtual or physical cards your end users receive, and analyze end user spend habits.

In short, Lithic Send is designed to enable you to build payout solutions quicker, move money faster, and design your ideal user experience. It offers all the speed you get with a turnkey solution, as well as the flexibility that a white-glove customized solution can offer, but without the limitations, additional costs, and weeks of development.

What’s next for Lithic?

Lithic Send is just the beginning of a long-tail strategy that will help us standardize how other types of card programs are built and implemented. The next set of products we plan to release will focus on streamlining programs with different fund flows and funding models.

We have a long and exciting roadmap ahead for these solutions and plan to release additional products and features that will reduce the time and money required to bring your custom card programs to market.

Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, Oct 18 at 10 am PT to learn more about Lithic Send, how it works, and how you can use it to power various types of card disbursement programs.