Providing more convenient, transparent and secure online payments

Only two things in life are certain. Taxes may be one of them, but how they’re paid is not.

In 2020, for the first time the total number of in-person payments fell in the U.S. From their homes, people discovered how easily they could pay digitally. Remote card payments rushed to fill the gap. While there were 11.7 billion fewer in-person payments than the year before, there were 8.7 billion more remote card payments (itself the largest one-year increase on record).

While the move to online payments started in retail, the need for convenient, transparent and secure payments is found in all areas where payments are made. Among U.S. taxpayers, for example, 14% pay by credit card with 30% saying they’d like to. A full 71% said they prefer to pay online.

Whether paying taxes, child support, fees or fines, why should the public payments experience be anything less?

Your own standards are already high

Citizens’ interactions with government agencies should be as convenient, transparent and secure as possible to improve the overall experience. Recognizing this, however, is not the challenge. Even at the highest levels of government, the call to modernize public payments has been heard.

Making payments more convenient

Government agencies can start with an up-to-date payments gateway. Install our gateway on your website, and you can expand your citizens’ choice of payment to all major debit and credit cards, as well as popular digital wallets.

To reduce friction in authenticating card-not-present (CNP) payments, consider an authorization tool like Worldpay's AuthMax solution. AuthMax uses data science to adjust the requirements for approval, so you can complete more authenticated transactions and reduce the number of false declines when citizens pay digitally.

With these tools, you can confidently offer a range of options to make government payments more convenient for citizens.

How to improve transparency

Citizens want to stay close to the payment process. In 2020 statistics from the U.S., 76% of online bills were paid directly through the biller’s own site (instead of the customer’s banking app).

You can deliver the transparency constituents want by giving them more control over their details. The One-Time Payment Portal, one of our Biller Solutions, means they can make a one-time payment without signing in. If they prefer to create a profile to store their details and review previous government payments, you can give them that option through the Enrolled Payment Portal.

In more complex cases, you might also need to provide more detail. DataPoint Reporting gives you permissions-based access to 36 months of transaction data in advanced, real-time or custom ad-hoc reports.

How to strengthen security

No matter how you approach the payments experience, you need to underpin convenience and transparency with top-level security.

You can make sure any partner you work with is helping you to secure payments by routing them through a protected domain, like the one in Biller API. This authenticates every citizen and validates every request before anything reaches your servers.

Worldpay complies with the highest security and privacy standards including PCI level 1, NACHA, CMMI level 2, FISMA and NIST. We work with, among others, Homeland Security, Microsoft and Financial Services ISAC to make sure we’re on top of new requirements. And we’re subject to numerous audits and inspections, including from the U.S. Treasury.

Ready to serve

We’ve seen how your dedication to service can pull you in too many directions at once. But giving people a public payments process that meets expectations doesn’t mean overextending yourself – or your department’s resources.

With Worldpay, government departments and agencies can combine tools that strike a balance between convenient, transparent and secure payments.