Paymentus and Oracle Add Billing and Payments Tools for Utilities

Paymentus Holdings and Oracle are offering new billing and payments tools for energy and water sector utilities.

The companies have fully validated the integration of the Paymentus Instant Payment Network (IPN) and electronic bill presentment and payment platform (EBPP) within the Oracle Energy and Water suite of Customer Information Systems (CIS), the companies said in a Tuesday (May 2) press release.

“Having a platform validated and regression-tested across Oracle Energy and Water’s CIS applications assures providers that their investment is protected, and they have adopted a platform for the future that will evolve and grow to meet the increasingly high bar of customer service expectations,” Paymentus Founder and CEO Dushyant Sharma said in the release.

PYMNTS research has found that nearly three out of four utility companies are investing or plan to invest in payments digitization.

Utility companies that are committed to digitized billing and payments processing have a long list of investment priorities that they believe will best position them for growth, according to “The Digital Payments Edge: How Utility Companies Can Succeed in the Digital Payments Revolution,” a PYMNTS and ACI Worldwide collaboration.

The report found that the most common areas of their payments operations in which they plan to invest in digitization involve a wider range of payment options, protection of consumer data and faster billing processes.

With the integration of the Paymentus IPN into the Oracle Energy and Water solutions, clients can accept online, mobile, interactive voice recognition (IVR), text, kiosk, point of sale (POS) and agent-assisted payments, according to the press release.

Offering this payment flexibility helps utilities accommodate a primary concern of consumers and drive customer action, adoption and satisfaction, the release said.

“Working with Paymentus and Oracle has helped many of our customers with not only the complexities of serving their energy and water consumers, but also tackle the challenge of evolving at speed to meet the moment,” Oracle Energy and Water Vice President for Global Alliances and Channels Matt Gleeson said in the release.

Customers in a variety of verticals are demanding modern bill payment solutions, Sharma said during Paymentus Holdings’ most recent quarterly earnings call.

“We continue to support consumer choice of payment channels and methods and are working to add more and more partners to the network to capture additional payment volume over IPN,” Sharma said during the Feb. 23 call.