Digital wallets meet customers’ digital payment demands
Monroe County Water Authority, an award-winning utility serving nearly 200,000 customers in the Rochester, New York area, wanted to expand its digital payment options to include popular alternative payments, such as PayPal and Venmo. The forward-looking utility acted on consumer trends indicating a growing desire to pay bills with these methods, providing its customers with greater choice and convenience with ACI Speedpay.
“As consumer demand for more digital payment options, including digital wallet payment methods and the ability to pay in increments or at a later date, has increased in the bill payments sector, we can conveniently meet our customers’ evolving needs.”
Manager of Customer Services, Monroe County Water Authority
The challenge
According to the latest ACI Speedpay Pulse consumer study, 47 percent of consumers want to pay their bills with alternative payment methods, including 59 percent of Gen Z and 61 percent of Millennials. Monroe County Water Authority was looking to meet this growing demand by adding PayPal and Venmo into their payment process.
The utility was also challenged with limited IT resources and sought an easy way to offer these new payment methods without further complicating their billing and payments operation.
The solution
The utility worked closely with ACI Worldwide to quickly add these new payment methods to their existing ACI Speedpay solution and develop consumer marketing campaigns to drive awareness and adoption.
ACI’s existing partnership with PayPal provided an effortless way to implement new payment methods while leveraging pre-built integration. This simplified the reconciliation and settlement reporting process.
The results
Monroe County Water Authority customers can now pay with just a few clicks or taps, using the PayPal or Venmo accounts they use to shop online and send money to friends and family. Customers can pay using the funding methods stored on PayPal or Venmo instead of having to enter a card or bank account number and can leverage two-factor authentication capabilities to ensure their payment information is secure. Monroe County Water Authority’s reconciliation process has not materially changed as alternative payments are funded, settled and reported with their existing payment methods.
Monroe County Water Authority also took advantage of ACI’s Digital Adoption Resource Center, using free downloadable assets and messaging to create consumer marketing campaigns to announce new payment options. These campaigns included website messaging, social media posts and other targeted communications, resulting in immediate customer adoption and usage.
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