For partners

Your residents leave with the urge tools.
We give them the financial scaffolding.

Impulse is a behavioral and financial wellness platform for adults rebuilding discipline post-treatment or post-incarceration. We partner with treatment centers, halfway houses, re-entry programs, and drug courts to give your members a card that physically can’t be used for the things they’re working to control — and to give you a measurable financial-independence outcome for your reporting.

The gap

Recovery practice is strong. Financial scaffolding isn’t.

Your members leave with peer support, sponsorship, after-care plans, urge-management practice. The piece almost no program has measurable infrastructure for is the moment a recently-discharged adult, alone at 11pm, opens the betting app or the shopping app or the wallet they emptied last time.

The first paycheck post-discharge is when financial-impulse triggers spike. Predatory lenders know this. Sportsbooks know this. We built the opposite.

What we built

A card that cannot be used for what they’re working to control.

01 · Deposit
A real bank account
FDIC-insured account, ACH in/out, behavioral categorization on every transaction. The first stable financial surface most members have had in years.
02 · Spending controls
Network-level merchant blocks
Gambling, sportsbook, lottery MCCs hard-blocked at the card network. Not a setting they can toggle — a structural block. Plus a 90-second guided breathing intercept on swipes during user-defined high-risk windows.
03 · Secured credit
Credit history, rebuilt
Deposit-backed credit card that reports to all three bureaus. The standard rebuild path — but underwritten with the behavioral data the rest of the financial system doesn’t have.
For accreditation

The outcome you have to track and no one can measure.

CARF requires accredited programs to track financial independence and self-sufficiency as a quality outcome. Most programs report it qualitatively because there’s no instrument.

We give you a measurable one. Aggregate, de-identified data from your members on Impulse becomes a clean line in your accreditation report:

“X% of alumni using Impulse maintained zero high-risk-MCC transactions for 90 days post-discharge.”

Maps directly to CARF’s financial-independence indicator and to SAMHSA’s National Outcome Measures.

How it works

Free for your members. Aligned with you.

01
Free to the resident or alumnus
No signup fees, monthly fees, overdraft fees, or junk fees of any kind. Ever. The product is free to your member, period.
02
Interchange revenue-share back to you
When members spend on the card, 15–25% of net interchange returns to your program. Aligned incentives — your activations fund your work.
03
Outcomes dashboard (optional)
$10/resident/month for the CARF-grade reporting tier — aggregated and de-identified data your accreditation cycle needs.
04
Foundation-grant partnership track
We’re pursuing parallel funding from Robin Hood, Arnold Ventures, Ford Foundation BUILD, and Aspen FSP. Pilots can be grant-underwritten end-to-end.
05
90-day pilot, jointly defined outcome
Start with one site or one cohort, 50–100 members, no cost. We co-design the metric tied to your accreditation or program reporting. Decision to expand is yours.
Who this is for

We’re a fit if you serve post-treatment or post-incarceration adults.

  • ●Residential SUD treatment centers
  • ●Halfway houses and sober-living networks (NARR-certified or otherwise)
  • ●Drug courts and treatment courts
  • ●Re-entry programs and transitional employment orgs
  • ●Recovery community organizations (RCOs)
  • ●Family-payor programs (parents/spouses funding a member’s recovery and financial reset)
What we will not do

The negative space is what makes this credible.

  • 01No junk fees. No overdraft fees. No late fees. No mandatory tips. No expedite charges.
  • 02No selling behavioral or financial data. Ever.
  • 03No payday-style lending products. We are the opposite of that.
  • 04No paid feature for unblocking spending controls. Once a member blocks a category, the block is real.
  • 05No gamifying recovery. No leaderboards. No streaks that shame.
  • 06No medical or clinical claims. We’re not therapy. We point to it where it’s needed.
Open a conversation

Twenty-five minutes. One slide. One ask.

We’ll walk you through the product and the partnership structure. If it lands, a 90-day pilot at one site, no cost. If it doesn’t, you get an honest read on whether it could in 12 months.

partners@impulseact.com

Or — see the product side first