The new USCIS Navigator tool, announced Monday (Nov. 24) is aimed at providing secure processing for payments to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), following a recent ban on check payments for immigration filings.
“We created USCIS Navigator in direct response to feedback from our legal clients who were facing an immediate operational challenge,” Anthony F. Loiacono Jr., managing director of Corpay Cross-Border Solutions, said in a news release.
“Our long-standing relationships within the legal community allowed us to understand the challenge, act quickly and build a best-in-class tool that not only solves the problem at hand, but also enhances efficiency, transparency, and cash flow management across their practices.”
According to the release, USCIS Navigator integrates directly with a firm’s billing system, automatically collecting invoice and payment data into a user interface that connects each filing fee to a unique, single-use virtual credit card.
From there, the system auto-generated the required credit card authorization form, transposing relevant payment and case data, and doing away with the need for manual check preparation and data entry.
“Each transaction is securely processed through Corpay’s commercial card program with real-time updates available as payments are processed by USCIS,” the release added. “The end-to-end automation provides law firms with full visibility into matter-specific payments, real-time tracking, secure, and traceable transactions.”
PYMNTS wrote last month about the government’s move away from check payments, noting that it was about more than simply efficiency. As check fraud remains a persistent headache in payments, shifting government funds onto digital rails is both a cost-savings measure and a defensive strategy.
Industry leaders project that as checks fade from federal programs, their shrinking role will speed the adoption of faster, safer channels across the broader economic landscape.
“The vast majority of government payments already are done via electronic methods,” said Reed Luhtanen, CEO and executive director of the U.S. Faster Payments Council (FPC) in an interview with PYMNTS in the wake of last week’s deadline.
With the government shifting the last of its check-based disbursements to digital channels, adjacent sectors are expected to follow suit.
“People will just naturally sort of gravitate to the better practice, which here is of course digital payments,” he said. “And I think we’ll see that follow-on effect not only from government payments, but also in other aspects of the payments ecosystem. As people get more familiar with the use of digital payments, they say ‘actually, I like that a lot better than getting a check.’”
