Case study
Capita payment solutions helping the
revenue flow at Portsmouth Water
“ With a long history of working with Capita, we had always found them to be competitive as regards
pricing and when we wanted to offer our customers additional payment choices, Capita was the obvious
choice, as it also meant that virtually all card payments would be handled by a single provider.
”
Paul Barfoot, Customer Services Manager at Portsmouth Water
Portsmouth Water is an independent water supplier,
serving around 280,000 households and 20,000
businesses in South East Hampshire and West Sussex.
This area includes the large towns and cities of
Portsmouth, Fareham, Gosport, Havant, Bognor Regis
and Chichester and generates an annual turnover of
almost £34m for water supply (sewerage services are
provided by Southern Water).
The Company had been taking customer payments
using Capita products since the mid 1990s and in 2005,
upgraded to Capita’s Counter Receipting and Income
Management products. Shortly afterwards, customers
were provided with a choice of self-service payment
options in the form of Capita’s Touch Tone (automated
telephone) and Internet Payments products.
Portsmouth Water has always been keen to adopt
card fraud protection measures as soon as they have
become available in order to help safeguard cardholder
data. These measures have included Chip and PIN for
cardholder present payments, Card Security Code
for payments made via the telephone or the internet
and Veri Secure (Verified by Visa and MasterCard
SecureCode) for internet payments.
Customers quick to adopt self-service
payments
About Capita’s Managed Service
With the option to pay by card being available around the
clock, customers have been quick to adopt the self-service
payment facilities available, which in turn bring efficiency
savings to the Company, most notably as these payments
are received without any requirement for staff involvement.
Annual throughput is in the order of around 23,000
payments via Touch Tone and around 8,000 payments via
the Internet. For those customers who prefer to speak to
someone when paying by card, the Company also provides
the option to take MOTO payments (details are provided
by telephone to an authorised member of staff) and this
option handles a further 27,000 payments each year.
The MOTO facility is useful for taking ‘opportunistic’
payments, where a customer calls in for other reasons
and is able to make a payment during the same phone
call and also can be used to take payments resulting
from a customer being called as a result of their account
being overdue.
Capita’s highly secure and established
managed service portfolio includes a range
of products to process card payments
via the Internet, touch tone, SMS text,
speech recognition and on-site Chip & PIN.
Managed by a dedicated team, the solution
is used by over 150 organisations who each
month process around 500,000 payments
with a total value of almost £65 million*.
The solution incorporates the latest
measures to help combat card fraud
including CSC (Card Security Code)
validation for MOTO (Mail Order
Telephone Order), Touch Tone and Speech
Recognition payments and card password
validation (Verified by Visa and MasterCard
SecureCode – collectively termed 3D
Secure) for payments made via the Internet.
Around 85% of card payments are made via debit card with
the remainder being by credit card, in which instance the
customer pays a surcharge of 1.5% to help offset the higher
cost to the Company of processing credit card payments.
Capita’s managed service products are
certified as Payment Card Industry Data
Security Standard (PCI DSS) Level 1 and
Capita is one of the first suppliers to the
utility marketplace to achieve the standard.
Paul Barfoot added:
* at November 2008
“ For our self-service options, it made sense to
use an established and secure managed service,
something that has become increasingly
attractive given the additional focus around card
fraud and the security of our customers’ data.
”
Capita Payment Management
Medtia Court
70 - 76 Brunswick Street
Oldham
OL1 1BT
0870 162 7800
[email protected]
www.capita-software.co.uk