eGov: Payment Manager

Hi, I'm Gord Boisvert, from the Active Network. We work with local government and community organizations, universities, colleges, cities and counties, that kind of thing.

One of the problems they have is that they are set up into multiple departments. So I have my tax department, I have my utility department, I have the parking, I have my recreation group and then over here on the side, I get my good friends in finance. Now the problem with this unfortunately is you, the citizen, walk-in here, and you have a tax bill. So, you go down to the tax department. May be you have a utility bill. So then, you get to go over to the utility department. And with any kind of luck, unfortunately for you, you may want to register your kid for a course, so you have to go to a whole other place somewhere else. So, this could have been on the first floor or this could have been on the eighth floor, this one could be in a whole another building somewhere else and this one definitely is in another building. So, you're going all over the place.

It gets no better when you mail stuff in. Same challenge. I have got two bills, how would I mail them in? You don't. You mail in multiple bills. Problem for finance, out little friends at finance, they have no control. They don't know what's going on here. They don't know what's going on here. They don't know what's doing on here. They have no idea what's going on anywhere.

The other group that gets a play in this is IT. IT gets to support point-of-sale solutions for every one of these and are probably different because each one of these vendors have provided their own thing.

We have a solution for that. Our solution is Payment Manager. What it does, it has it's own little database that allows you to consolidate this stuff. What it uses, inside the database, we have stored procedures, we have a web service call, whichever works best to get up the stuff, and it interacts bi-directionally with this stuff in a real time. So what happens, when somebody walks in with their tax bill or utility bill, it will consolidate it, so the person can do one transaction and is doing the business logic for this stuff too in a real time environment. We also have a web frontend and an IVR frontend. Now IVR is just Interactive Voice Response you can do Touchstone Self Service. These two are self-service. The advantage of this, now you get to come in when it's convenient to you, on your own time, not in their hours or if you do want to come into any of these places that is convenient for you, you can do everything in a single transaction.

Our little friends in finance, they are happy now because they have control. They have a place they can report on, they can look at anything that came through in the entire city in one nice little spot. IT is happy because this stuff all disappears and they only have one frontend they have to deal with. So what this does, this makes it effective for you, for finance, for every department in the city including IT.