City council moving to web payment system

By RICHARD WOOD

The Auckland City Council is preparing to take credit card payments across the web for a range of its services.

The council's IT department is working with local Microsoft . Net developer, Ubiquity, and has a joint marketing arrangement that will give it royalties if the "enterprise payment gateway" solution is later sold elsewhere.

The software is called uTransact and it is a payment gateway "engine" that can plug into all the council's back-end computer systems and accept payments for web-offered services.

ACC manager of business systems Peter Blackwell said off-the-shelf software was very good if you had one product or product line, but the council needed to be able to accept payments across a wide range of services, such as traffic fines, library research, land information, and dog licences.

"We just could not find a payment gateway that would take all kinds of credit cards for a wide range of services, and generate refunds and things like that," he said.

The council will also be considering accepting rates by credit card, but has some work to do in checking the legal situation.

Blackwell said the council was "very keen to move into the e-space" and the system was expected to go live this year.

He said the present state of the project was that the ACC had the "engine" in place and had interfaced it to its enterprise SAP system. Stress testing was complete.