Jennifer was talking to some big shot Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville, Arkansas. She said, “Our software will take care of your payroll issues, and we’ll give it to you, free. Ever since Operation U.S.A. Freedom, a lot of the government-imposed complications are gone. Like, you don’t have to withhold state income taxes or pay unemployment taxes. The important thing to remember is that this allows you to pay your associates every day.”

One vice-president replied, “If we pay them every day, instead of every two weeks and holding back a week, we won’t have the use of that money.”

Jennifer replied, “It’s no longer good business to run your company on your employees’ capital. They’ve earned the money. The excuse that it takes time and costs money to compute and issue all those paychecks is no longer convincing. Besides, a lot of people would want to work at your company, but they would have to wait three weeks to get paid, and that deters them. I recommend you give your employees a choice, get paid every day by direct deposit to their Remesa account, or every two weeks, by paper check.”

Another vice president said, “By holding back some money, we retain for ourselves a security deposit that can prove useful in some termination situations.”

Jennifer replied, “The vast majority of terminations will be improved, because you can pay the associate immediately. You also deter resignations if the associates get paid every day by Wal-Mart, but they would have to wait three weeks to get paid if they started work somewhere else. Paying daily relieves some of the upward pressure on wages. Furthermore, you might want associates to come in and work overtime on a Saturday, the first day of the pay period, but they’d have to pay for meals, transportation and child care that day, when they won’t get paid for twenty days. This might deter them from accepting the overtime.”

Yet another vice-president said, “These things are true, and we’re always looking for ways to cut our costs and offer the lowest possible prices. I’m in favor of accepting this proposal.”

Jennifer explained, “Remesa Banking Company will provide you with account start-up kits. Personnel managers in each store will participate in the process of setting up new accounts. They have already verified the applicant’s identity, for example. They would give the applicant the CD-ROM and the paperwork for transferring money over the telephone if the associate doesn’t have a home computer. Now, let me mention that a lot of factories can be convinced to accept payments by direct deposit to their Remesa accounts. You deposit money into thousands of different banks, some of them are our correspondent banks. You can transfer that money from your account to Remesa’s account, and then Remesa will credit the same amount to your Remesa balance. Then you can log onto our server and pay those invoices. Once you approve an invoice, then you need to log on and enter the information. After forty-eight hours, you can log back on again and effect the actual payment. The interval will prevent a hacker from accessing your account. If they log on and enter a fake invoice, you’ll catch it within those forty-eight hours, and prevent the hacker from being able to effect the final payment. If you need to effect a payment on less notice, more security procedures will be needed in those cases. This system eliminates paper checks. That’s important to some of your suppliers, since they receive paper checks and then have to wait until the checks clear before they can spend the money, and in the mean time, they cannot use that money to pay the temp agency the overdue balance, so they might not be able to bring in workers to run the production line to produce more product for you. We want to make all financial transactions faster and more efficient.”

One vice-president said, “We have a lot of money in various banks, invested in long-term certificates, because we’ll need it to open new stores. Can you compete as far as interest rates with the big banks?”

Jennifer replied, “No, we’re not specializing in long-term deposits. We want Remesa Banking Company to be the place where you put your short-term money, because of transactional efficiency. That’s our niche. If you’re investing millions of dollars for months or years at a time, you’re really better off depositing that money elsewhere.”