Government finance and IT executives are seeking new innovative payment technology strategies to help implement policies and standardization related to acceptance of payments from constituents.
The topic of electronic payment technology is red hot in government today. Government executives are buzzing with new trends in payment performance, convenience fee and non-convenience fee models, compliance, data security, customer experience and procurement practices.
Here are six developments to watch:
Need for lower convenience fees or service fee pricing.
You can often get lower pricing by comparing your pricing with other similar sized government entities. You can also make slight adjustments in your transactional strategy such as encouraging lower cost transaction types such as electronic check, card present transactions and paying with debit cards.
Electronic payments adoption is here to stay.
The time to incorporate this technology is now. Many state and local governments are moving in this direction, exploring the use of additional payment channels for the advantages of security and convenience, the ability to meet changing customer expectations, and ease of set up, to name a few. Some even use convenience fee models to help support the flexibility of opening up additional self-service payment channels like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Kiosks and Web payments.
Customers are using mobile devices to connect to government services.
There’s been a tremendous increase in the use of mobile in government. But many governments haven’t updated their payment options to make mobile payments easy. Through the addition of payment technology, most government enterprises could easily introduce a strategy around mobile and be prepared for customers to pay via the use of mobile devices.
Government entities are benchmarking against other similar size governments.
There’s a lot of talk about comparing government practices amongst those of similar size. A new best practice that we see evolving is governments comparing their electronic payment acceptance practices with other government entities. Areas of discussion often include pricing, performance measures, customer satisfaction, and adoption trends and software integration practices. We can facilitate these conversations.
You can eliminate lengthy RFP processes.
Did you know that you can likely use your existing banking services contract to procure electronic payment technology? We work with more than 100 major U.S. banks that have access to our payment services and technology. In fact, many of the largest banks in the U.S. put their name on our technology and offer it as their own. You might be able to avoid lengthy RFP processes by simply contacting us or your bank. In many cases, your existing bank agreement can be used, and in some cases, you may utilize a neighboring county’s negotiated agreement. Be sure to contact us for more information.
Third party payment portal usage is trending downward.
There’s a trend in governments shifting away from third party payment portals (software that acts as a transfer point, enabling your customer to link to a generic or vendor branded website where constituents can enter payment information). These third-party branded payment portals are falling out of favor with government organizations because all too often, they result in a negative customer experience. Many of these solutions are also limited in integration capabilities often resulting in more workload for government departments and difficulties with reconciliation. There are plenty of easy alternatives. We have demonstrations of fluid solutions that increase customer adoption.
How is your organization keeping up? Are you confident in your PCI compliance? Do you have the best convenience fee pricing?
We’d love to talk about strategies that:
- Increase adoption usage of residents;
- Utilize the latest technology for data security;
- Provide the most sought-after implementation practices to reduce IT overhead expense; and;
- Utilize the most relevant multi-channel solutions that position your government enterprise to best meet customer expectations.
