Starting June 1, 2022, residents of Fort Smith, Arkansas, have a new way to pay their utility bills online or using a mobile app as part of an official partnership between the city and PayIt, the leader in digital government services and payments.
With a population of nearly 90,000, Fort Smith is the third largest city in Arkansas. A developing downtown scene supported by growing local businesses and surrounded by historic architecture combines with the city’s rich heritage as a pioneer town and gateway for westward expansion to create a vibrant quality of life for those who call it home.
PayIt and the City of Fort Smith are further improving that quality of life by providing residents with the user-friendly PayIt Forth Smith online payment portal, as well as offering residents the new option of making payments from their mobile devices. Using PayIt Fort Smith, residents can create a single profile where they can store payment information and property information in addition to setting up reminder notifications.
“People will have a new way to go in and pay their bills with a proper, practical user interface, and it will save … credit card numbers (which can not be done on the current system), making it a much more usable system.”
– Fort Smith City Administrator Carl Geffken
Fort Smith’s leadership considered community input as part of the decision to enter this new agreement, as both residents and city staff noted that the existing system was difficult to use, costly to maintain and unable to support multiple payment methods and types. As a result, the city noted low adoption rates among residents as well as high delinquencies and errors.
“It’s been our team’s privilege over the past few months to support the Fort Smith City Officials, Finance and IT teams during their evaluation of next generation digital technology. Moving forward, and starting with city Utility payments, we are thrilled to see the city has chosen to partner with PayIt to provide a modern digital citizen wallet for Fort Smith residents to access and pay for any government service.”
– PayIt Vice President of Client Success Jack Laskowitz
As part of the partnership, PayIt will also provide 24-hour customer support for users and the city of Fort Smith, reducing the number of manual interactions between residents and city staff in person or via its call center.
The City of Fort Smith can also expand its PayIt tools in the future to create “a one-stop shop” for residents to make all of their payments to the city, according to Joshua Robertson, deputy director of business administration for the utility department. Such an expansion could include the ability to pay fees related to parking tickets, licenses and permits.
About PayIt
PayIt is the leading SaaS provider of digital government services and payments. Through cloud-native technology, PayIt’s platform simplifies doing business with government agencies of any size by consolidating hundreds of services and payments into one connected experience for residents. Within a 90-day launch period, PayIt delivers a platform that allows residents to handle all of their essential government tasks (i.e. taxes, driving documents, permits, licenses, fines).
This innovative approach to government service delivery has garnered significant recognition in both the public and private sectors:
- GovTech 100 (2017-2021)
- Fast Company Innovation in Design Award (2019)
- StateScoop 50 State IT Innovation of the Year (2019-2020)
- NASCIO State IT Recognition finalist (2020)
- LocalSmart Awards (2020)
