What were the challenges of integrating Forage with the government's technology capacities to enable EBT payment processing?

Forage works with the government. We have to 100% follow the rules. We value their feedback and meet with them on a weekly cadence to get it. They gave us the guidelines to build this thing out, and we followed through with it. In terms of the user experience, it’s not common to input a four digit pin for every single purchase. But that’s the nature of what we needed to do in order to ensure the government approves our payment processing. So there’s that component in terms of technology.

Existing providers are really faulty. There are two state processors that together, for the most part, cover most of the states. One is Conduent and the other is FIS. We’re directly connected to FIS, which helps us in terms of reliability. Our reliability is a derivative of AWS’s reliability. Fiserv, our competitor, relies on First Data’s on-premise infrastructure, actual physical infrastructure. And we’re in the cloud.