The Social Security Administration (SSA) recently automated the exchange of account information between financial institutions and the SSA through the e4641 program. Before this automation, when an applicant is eligible for supplemental security income (SSI) benefits, financial institutions would have to manually verify the assets of each applicant and submit the asset verification to the SSA. The manual verification provides a security risk as well as a timing risk for applicants to get their SSI benefits, with even the potential of applicants getting denied their benefits. With the e4641 program, the exchange of SSA requests and the financial institution’s responses are now completed securely through a file transfer protocol (FTP).  

In 2021, Smiley Technologies, Inc. worked with the SSA and its 3^rd party contractor to implement the e4641 program for Southern Bancorp Bank, a $1.9 billion asset size bank. Southern Bancorp is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) bank that has 52 locations in Arkansas and Mississippi. The deployment of the e4641 program will save the bank an estimated 364 hours of employees’ time a year.  

As a core provider for community banks, the automation project is just one of the programming projects that we provide for our partner banks. It also shows our ability and agility to build these types of projects, instead of just buying it from an outside development firm.  

This project led to a more efficient and secure way for the bank to submit the asset verification, while helping SSI applicants get their benefits faster. A win-win for the bank and its customers. We are looking to provide this project to our other partner banks and implement the automation of asset verification for Medicaid. Stay tuned!

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