About City of Austin, TX
The City of Austin is the capital of Texas with over 50 city departments and serves nearly one million residents. They are focused on the citizen experience by fostering transparency, accessibility, and innovation with the services they provide. As such, they prioritize key goals including ensuring equitable access to resources, promoting sustainability, and building a resilient infrastructure. The City of Austin is committed to creating an inclusive, responsive government that supports the diverse needs of its residents and fosters continuous improvement.
Challenge: Outdated Systems were Providing an Inconsistent Customer Experience
The City of Austin wanted to modernize its online payment system to provide a unified user experience across various systems and departments. The city was looking for a vendor that could integrate software into their source systems, enabling those applications that don’t natively have an online payment solution to accept online payments. Austin wanted to provide a better, more consistent end-user experience across more systems and needed a flexible, unified payment solution to automate the bank reconciliation and cash receipt processes.
“We wanted a more modern and responsive design. We wanted a more cohesive view for the end user so they can see their payments with many different systems in one place. If I had any advice for other cities, it would be that you want to enable your citizens to have the best experience,” shared Mark Caraway, IT Corporate Manager, Financial Services.
Solution: A Centralized Payment Solution with an Intuitive Design
Austin selected Euna Payments to provide a cloud-based, API-driven payment platform with a modern and responsive design. The platform integrates with multiple agency source systems to allow customers to easily make payments online and via mobile devices. Customers can now see all of their payments in one place, including payments for lost library books permits, donations to Animal Services, and more. Payment information is recorded and posted automatically to the General Ledger through direct integrations to Austin’s source Revenue Management, Euna Payment’s powerful reporting and reconciliation tool, enables staff to get a holistic view of payment activity across every agency on the platform and allows staff to generate a wide variety of reports for financial review. The solution has improved the reconciliation process, saved staff hours of work, and increased revenue for the City of Austin.
“It is a responsibility to our citizens to keep up with technology, and Euna Payments is a step in the right direction. We want to give citizens the best possible experience while also providing efficiencies here at the city,” said Caraway.
Results: High User Adoption and Improved Customer Experience
The new solution provides residents with 24/7 access to make bill payments when it is most convenient for them. The centralized solution allows residents to go to one place to make a variety of payments for various city services.
- 12 city agencies have been onboarded onto the cloud-based, secure platform
- 15,000 transactions processed per month, on average
- 84% of transactions are made by repeat users
Euna Payments enables the City of Austin to provide secure online and mobile payment options for a dozen payment applications, including permits, hotel taxes, and public information requests. Customers can view account information for all 12 city agencies in one place. The simplified checkout process allows customers to save their information for future payments or checkout as a guest. The solution offers a unified place for staff to view all payment activity, with automated revenue management that helps the city streamline operations with efficiencies and realize revenue more consistently and quickly.
- Automating processes and centralizing reconciliation has streamlined operations for staff, saving hours of work and enabling better customer service.
- The integrated platform helps the city realize revenue more quickly and maintain secure IT infrastructure.
- Customers have the same easy payment experience via a desktop or mobile device .
- The City of Austin can easily integrate additional departments to the online payment platform.