Choice Digital Passes 300 Clients as Utilities Embrace Payout Choice
Growth across utility, energy efficiency, and incentive programs reflects rising demand for recipient choice — and for SurePay, the delivery capability that gets payouts into the people waiting on them.
BROOMFIELD, CO — May 15, 2025 — Choice Digital, a digital disbursement platform for regulated industries, today announced it now serves more than 300 clients. A milestone reached as utilities and program administrators move away from single-option payouts toward multi-method payout programs built on recipient-choice payout.
The growth has come from two directions. Utilities and energy program administrators are modernizing rebate, incentive, and deposit-return payouts under pressure to improve customer satisfaction scores while cutting operational costs. At the same time, program orchestrators and implementers who run disbursements on behalf of many end clients have standardized on Choice Digital, extending modern payouts across entire program portfolios through a single integration.
What they share is a move away from the single default. Whether that default is a paper check or a bill credit, one method cannot serve every recipient. Choice Digital's research with utility customers found that no single payout method draws more than 25% of consumer preference, which means any program running one option is delivering most of its recipients something they did not want.
The costs differ by method, but they land in the same place. Paper checks carry print, mail, reissue, and stop-payment expense, generate the majority of payout-related support volume, and hand recipients who pay check-cashing fees less than the program intended. Bill credits are operationally simpler, but they bury what should be a rewarding moment inside a bill, and they decide on the recipient's behalf where the money goes.
Offering a choice of methods addresses both, and Choice Digital clients pair that choice with SurePay, the delivery capability that keeps a payout moving until it reaches the recipient through configurable reminders and automatic physical fallback when a digital payout goes unclaimed.
Southern California Gas offers one example. After partnering with Choice Digital, SoCalGas eliminated roughly 50,000 paper checks a year and found that 81% of its customers prefer modern payment methods, while improving payment transparency for internal, external, and regulatory stakeholders.
"Three hundred clients is a signal about the market, not just about us," said Jay Grinde, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Choice Digital. "Utilities are no longer asking whether recipients want a say in how they get paid. They are asking how quickly they can offer it without adding compliance risk or rebuilding what they already have."
Every program runs on the same compliance-ready platform, with identity verification, sanctions screening, tax reporting, escheatment handling, and full audit trails built in, and integration by API, SFTP, or file upload.
Organizations interested in modernizing their payout programs can request a consultation at choicedigital.com/contact-us/sales.
About Choice Digital
Choice Digital is the payout experience complex programs trust — the modern way to pay people at scale in regulated industries. The Choice Suite gives every recipient a modern, branded, choose-your-own-method payout experience, while the Choice Platform gives program managers control, real-time visibility, and compliance built in. Make every payout matter.
Media contact: Theresa McEndree, Chief Growth Officer, theresa@cdco.io