How software providers can streamline payments for government entities
Introduction
Manual processes are inefficient and costly, and this challenge is particularly evident in the public sector, affecting many municipalities and government agencies.
For government software vendors, this represents an opportunity to facilitate digital transformation, helping these entities overcome their reluctance to go digital. While the reasons for this hesitation vary — from funding constraints to bureaucratic rules — the shift towards digital solutions can significantly enhance citizen engagement and operational efficiency.
As a software provider, your role is pivotal in this process. By integrating seamless payment technologies into your software, you can help municipalities automate processes such as account management, customer communications, billing, and collections.
This leads to improved costefficiency and better citizen services for municipalities and, in turn, provides government software vendors with opportunities to deepen their market presence and forge lasting partnerships in the public sector.
Learn how you can help your customers in the public sector, through tools specfically built to:
• Make it faster, easier and less expensive for citizens to make accurate, on time payments – even if they own multiple properties.
• Enable citizens to make more informed choices that protect their own resources and community resources, by reducing risk and cost.
• Decrease staff workload and eliminate cumbersome manual processes to streamline operations.
Maximizing payment efficiency and improving citizen engagement
For most municipalities and government agencies, requesting and receiving payments is the primary interaction with citizens. And many of these interactions are manual, require a paper check, a stamp and possibly even a trip to a post office or your office.
Manual payments are also slow, inefficient and offer notoriously poor user experiences. So efficiency, cost effectiveness and customer experience are key reasons why digital payments
have the potential to completely transform your customers’ operations.
Citizens increasingly prefer to make payments online rather than writing a check. In fact, almost half of Americans have not written a single check in the past year.
And among those who have, half of those wrote only one check a month, most likely to pay a utility or other government agency.1
Paper check processing is incredibly resource intensive and costly to a business.
From account management, to customer communications, billing and collections – all these manual processes quickly add up and the cost only increases with the volume of checks that require processing.
So, the more software providers can automate these processes, the more efficient their customers in the public sector can be.
10x more for paper checks
The True Cost of Manual Processes
Direct Costs Can Be Immense
For most municipalities and government agencies, the payment process is a major part of operating expenses because it monopolizes a large number of human resources.
Upgrading your customers to a digital payment solution can reduce direct costs. Most savings are the result of increasing accuracy, automating payment
What if there’s a low adoption rate?
Automating payments and online billing are only useful if people are actually using these features. With the right payment provider—one that offers a great digital experience for citizens—high adoption rates are a key to success.
Using built-in tools to increase customer engagement, a truly modern solution can significantly increase adoption rates.
The True Cost of Manual Processes
Indirect Costs Add Up Fast
For your customers and the citizens they serve, the indirect costs of manual processing are harder to quantify, but they can be significant:
• More invoicing or payment errors
• More fraud exposure
• Lost value of employees doing higherlevel tasks
• Poor customer experiences
Perhaps the hardest indirect cost to measure is the day-today disruptions from a high volume of inbound calls or walkin visits from citizens. When they don’t have access to an easytouse online account, they will consume
significantly more one-on-one customer service time.
Municipalities and government agencies also need to communicate critical health, safety or services information to citizens.
With a manual workflow, these emergency alerts can be slow or delayed, once again generating a flurry of calls and drop-ins from concerned or confused citizens.
But a full-service payment and citizen
Evaluating a payments provider?
For government software vendors, the choice of a payment provider needs to be based on their ability to meet the vendors’ unique needs and those of their customers in the public sector. Look for these key features:
• White label and co-branded integration options
• Government expertise
• Auto and recuring payments
• Electronic billing (e-billing)
• Notifications and Payment Reminder Alerts to Citizens
• Multilingual dashboard configuration
• Text and Pay and Pay-by-Email
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• Online access to view billing statements and payment histories
• Consolidated accounts: multiple properties under one login
• US-based English and Spanish citizen support
• Fast notifications and payment reminder alerts to citizens
• Next business day funding
• Real-time reports with dashboard capabilities
• Ability to disable access to payment
Beyond Payments: The Value of Engaged Citizens
Better Citizen Engagement Means More Revenue
People prefer digital payments because they are fast and easy. More citizens can and will make accurate, on-time payments when they can pay with their preferred channel.
In fact, many citizens will opt for AutoPay—with Nuvei, clients have enjoyed an 800% increase in annual AutoPay enrollments—improving cash flow and reducing time spent on collections. These on-time payments can have a very positive impact on how your customers operate.
Digital payments can also eliminate the friction commonly associated with paying bills for multiple properties. These property owners have historically had a disjointed customer experience that can be solved with a consolidated online account.
When municipalities are electronically connected to citizens, it’s fast and easy for them to share information, including payment notifications, emergency alerts and tips for managing utility consumption and protecting community resources, enabling citizens to make more informed choices.
This is real citizen engagement that goes beyond the billing cycle, and can reduce costs while creating a greater sense of community.
Citizen engagement can improve immensely with a digital platform that integrates invoicing, billing and communications.
With more information at their fingertips— literally on their smartphones—they are much more likely to pay on time and employ resource-saving measures.
Citizen Portal Benefits
Uniting Billing and Engagement for Citizens
There are many payments providers that offer a so-called “digital solution” for citizen billing. Unfortunately, most of these systems do not focus on citizen adoption.
If your current software is not delivering the payment features your customers need, or it’s lacking the adoption rates to really be effective, consider integrating a purposebuilt solution—one designed specifically for the needs of municipalities and government agencies.
Nuvei Government Suite is a platform that has been helping municipalities and government agencies automate billing and drive citizen engagement for more than 30 years.
In fact, our clients have seen a 42% increase in eBilling enrollment, which saves money spent on printing, postage
and payment processing.
Purpose-built, our platform includes a wide array of musthave features that make billing, account management and communications easy for citizens thanks to:
• Multilingual capabilities—any language can be added to the dashboard to support and empower non-English or ESL speakers
• Multiple property groupings so one property owner can see all accounts in one place
• Notifications and alerts built right into your platform, so customers don’t have to purchase this function from yet another third-party vendor
• Two-way communication, which makes it easier for citizens to correspond with municipalities
• Built-in marketing and incentives, such as citizen adoption contests
Administrator Portal Benefits
Uniting Billing and Engagement for Employees
Nuvei Government Suite has earned the top spot on many software providers’ and municipalities’ wish lists, thanks to exceptional features that enable immediate connections to citizens, custom and scheduled reporting, and configurable dashboard options.
Here is an overview of the benefits you can offer to your customers with Nuvei Government Suite:
• Automated billing and payments processing, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value tasks
• Streamlined operations without manual errors that require remediation
• Increased revenue with more on-time and
• Access to bilingual, fulltime support and call-center representatives who can provide timely assistance to ensure business continuity and operational excellence
• Better visibility into citizen accounts, so it’s
BELEN’S SUCCESS STORY WITH NUVEI DELIVERING REAL IMPACT:
ABOUT BELEN
The regional utility department in Belen, New Mexico, plays a crucial role in serving the city’s citizens and managing their billing needs. Beyond its primary function of collecting payments for water utilities, the utility department also assumes the responsibility of processing payments on behalf of various other municipal departments.
THE CHALLENGE
Belen’s Utility Department used both utility billing software and a web-based online bill payment system. The payment system was outdated and slow to scale its capabilities, relying heavily on the clerks’ manual input. It was crucial to provide citizens with a seamless, easy-to-use payment platform that improved adoption and minimized late payments.
THE SOLUTION
Critically, Belen’s Utility Department needed the system to improve the timeliness of payments, increase the use of online transactions, and reduce the overall number of customer calls and walk in payments. Nuvei Government Suite was ideal. It featured multilingual capabilities, citizen engagement features, multi-property management, and walk-in shopping cart functionality.
THE RESULTS
After the Nuvei platform was established, portal registrations increased substantially; 400%. Autopay signups increased by an astounding 830%. This success is both thanks to Nuvei’s intuitive technology and the multi-lingual features for Belen’s Spanishspeaking citizens. To date, over 50% of Belen’s citizens use the Nuvei Government Suite.
KEY RESULTS
+400%
Portal registrations
+830%
Autopay signups
50%
Adoption rate
Trust Nuvei to Enhance Your Offering
Nuvei has a proven track record of helping municipalities and government agencies modernize. That’s why software vendors can count on us to provide an extensive array of purposebuilt features and functions that can enhance their offering to customers in the public sector.
Furthermore, Nuvei has:
• Over 30 years serving government agencies
• More than 3,000 government agencies served
• $2.5 Billion volume processed annually
• 8 million payments processed annually
• 30+ states served
Streamlining payments with Nuvei
Government software vendors are uniquely positioned to advance municipal payment processes by integrating digital solutions like Nuvei Government Suite.
Upgrading from legacy payment systems, caters to the digital preferences of citizens and streamlines municipal operations, enhancing service quality and reducing complexities.
For software providers, this translates into opportunities to accelerate revenue by offering customers superior services and technology, while solidifying their market position in the public sector.
ABOUT NUVEI
Nuvei is the Canadian fintech company accelerating the business of clients around the world. Nuvei’s modular, flexible and scalable technology allows leading companies to accept next-gen payments, offer all payout options and benefit from card issuing, banking, risk and fraud management services. Connecting businesses to their customers in more than 200 markets, with local acquiring in 50 markets, 150 currencies and 720 alternative payment methods, Nuvei provides the technology and insights for customers and partners to succeed locally and globally with one integration. For more information, visit nuvei.com/use-cases/government
