How a Modernized Payments System Met City Residents Needs

Organization Profile

• Population: 270,000
• Client Since: 2010
• Solutions Used: CASHIERING, ENTERPRISE ERP, PAYMENTS
• Profile: Home to the University of Wisconsin, Madison is the state capital. Founded in 1829, Madison, which has a thriving tech sector, is the fastest growing city in Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Hospital, and state government are the city’s largest employers. About 25,000 students are enrolled in the Madison Metropolitan School District’s 46 schools. Famous people from Madison include architect Frank Lloyd Wright, writer Thornton Wilder, and actress Gena Rowlands.

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Challenge

In response to limitations of its payments solutions, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, decided to tackle modernization of both its payments processing system and community-facing portals.

To optimize its processes, Madison’s goals were to implement a solution that:

• Integrates with its current ERP solution, Tyler Technologies’ Enterprise ERP
• Meets Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance standards
• Provides the benefits of single-vendor support

In addition, Madison sought to provide its constituents with a user-friendly portal that could act as a convenient, one-stop-shop for paying city bills across departments.

Solution

To achieve its goals, Madison turned to Tyler’s Payments platform.

“We had already been using Tyler’s Cashiering, and we had no intention of changing that,” says Jeff Dempsey, financial systems analyst for the city of Madison. “We looked at the other options, but we like working with Tyler Technologies. Tyler’s Payments option made the most sense for us because of the streamlined integration that it provides between our various payment portals, whether it’s point of sale, with Cashiering or online with Resident Access or Utility Access. The integration is just fantastic.”

Meeting Payment Security Standards

A top goal for the city was ensuring compliance with PCI standards, a set of guidelines organizations must follow to protect credit card data and prevent misuse of personal information. Failure to meet standards results in fines from card brands, payment processors, and acquiring banks.

As Dempsey explains, “At some point, we had fallen out of PCI compliance because we were using old magnetic swipe card readers. So, the city was paying fines every month.”

Implementation of Payments ensured that Madison stayed in compliance.

Tyler Technologies is a licensed money transmitter and is equipped to handle all aspects of the payment process, reducing the number of entities required to handle citizens’ sensitive information. Payments is a tightly integrated, secure payment platform for online payments that is compliant with PCI/PA-DSS standards.

“We’re now saving our city and residents money by not having to pay those unnecessary fines,” says Dempsey. “And it’s providing a much more secure way for our customers to make their payments because part of that PCI noncompliance was that we weren’t using point-to-point encryption, but Payments uses that. And we’re confident that Payments is enabling us to stay within PCI compliance standards.”

The Power of Integrations

The connections between Payments and Enterprise ERP have proven particularly valuable. Madison uses a full suite of Enterprise ERP solutions including:

• Financial Management, with procurement and Vendor Access connecting directly to online vendor resources, resulting in shorter processing times, more accurate records, and reduced data entry
• Human Resources and Payroll with Employee Access to enable staff, retirees, and job applicants to take control of their data, while increasing HR efficiencies
• Utilities with Resident Access, Utility Access, and Smart Meter Access, where customers can access past and current utility bills and payment history, make new payments, and receive expanded customer self-service options to quickly resolve billing and service issues.

“It’s a great solution if you’re using Enterprise ERP because of the integration,” says Dempsey. “Having to deal with one software vendor as opposed to multiple vendors – it just simplifies everything.”

Madison’s decision to go with a single vendor for Payments and ERP billing has:

• Simplified reconciliation of payments because of the elimination of third-party payment processing in the workflow, reducing work for end-users
• Streamlined support, which now involves working with one company instead of trying to coordinate between multiple entities
• Reduced strain on the IT department, which no longer needs to maintain software connections with multiple software vendors
• Enhanced security because of fewer entities in the payment workflow

Dempsey points to improved insight into data flow as a critical benefit of Payments embedded in Tyler’s ERP.

“When a payment is made, whether online, over the phone, or at a cashiering station, it instantaneously integrates and updates on the Enterprise ERP side,” says Dempsey. “We can see the receipt immediately. It creates the payments batch within Enterprise ERP. It creates the journal entry, which then ultimately it will hit our general ledger and or project ledger depending on the transaction.

“This seamless integration makes everything so much more efficient for us, and it’s just fantastic. It’s real time. It’s instantaneous. When a payment is made, we can instantly see it flow throughout the system.”

Convenience For Community Members

Community members have also benefited. Madison implemented Tyler’s Resident Access, an easy-to-use portal that facilitates community engagement with municipal services and is integrated with a variety of Enterprise ERP revenue management applications, including tax billing and collections and utility billing.

Resident Access can also include Utility Access and Smart Meter Access portals to further enhance revenue and customer service options. Before going live with Resident Access and Utility Access, customers had ways to pay online. But those online payment portals did not integrate with Enterprise ERP.

With Resident Access and Utility Access, a customer can use the same credentials to link to various accounts they might have with the city to pay tax and utility bills and more, providing a more convenient way to make payments.

“They can make all of their payments at the same time with the cart,” says Dempsey. “You just add the payments into the cart, and you can pay them all in one fell swoop. Community members can now schedule payments and sign up for auto payments. We have had many customers reach out and thank us for creating the new portals, because they are very user friendly, very intuitive.”

Dempsey, a resident of Madison, is an ethusiastic user of Tyler’s access portals: “I love the Utility Access portal,” he says. “I log on there all the time to track my own household’s water consumption. I can’t see real-time data, but I can see up to the previous day’s consumption data. I can monitor my household’s water consumption and see it. I can break it down to the hour. It’s a fantastic tool, and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback from our customers about that.”

Working With Tyler

Finally, Dempsey points to his working relationship with Tyler: “If anybody were to ask me if they were considering Tyler’s Payments, I would encourage them to move forward with that. I’ve been with the city for about seven years now, and I’ve worked very closely with Tyler tech support and other folks. The experience has been overall extremely positive. Tyler support is super helpful, and the online support portal is a great way to get assistance when we need it. The folks at Tyler Technologies are extremely receptive when we have ideas or suggestions.”

As an early adopter of a number of products, Madison has deep experience working with Tyler: “It’s a real collaborative effort, I feel we’re helping them make their product better, and they’re helping us by taking our suggestions seriously and being willing to consider them, if not outright adopting them and making them come to life. So, yes, working with Tyler Technologies is wonderful.”