More than 1,400 families have collected $740,000 in the first payout from the city's daring two-year experiment that rewards the poor with hard cash for doing good, officials said yesterday.

Another 919 families who enrolled in the "conditional cash transfer" program did not qualify by the first cutoff date, Nov. 15.

But city officials called the initial results of Opportunity NYC a success, noting that the first-in-the-nation initiative had been launched within months of being proposed and is now fully operational. ...

Rourke O'Brien, an asset-building analyst at the New America Foundation, said the complexity of the undertaking made the city's achievement thus far "really impressive."

He said it was especially important that poor people now had access to regular financial services through mandated bank accounts rather than "walking to the check casher down the street." ...

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