New online payment system coming to Charlottetown

Previous system archaic and in need of a full overhaul

Anyone who has tried to access the City of Charlottetown’s online payment system to pay utility bills or police tickets over the past several months would have been out of luck.

According to the city’s communication officer Jennifer Gavin, the system was archaic and needed a full overhaul.

Online payment system technology is always being updated to protect the needs of the consumers, Gavin told The Guardian in an email.

“The new payment system has the most current coding standards and utilizes the latest security measures.”

Gavin said the testing for both online payment systems – one for utility bills and the other for police tickets – is complete and went “very well”.

However, there were a couple delays in the project, she said.

As the staff was training on the new system, it was discovered that it was automatically set up to charge a transaction fee to anyone paying their ticket online.

“The city did not want the fee passed on to the customer and requested a change in the system to allow the corporation to absorb the cost,” she said, adding the transaction fee is 1.75 per cent of whatever the payment is being made by the customer. “This has since been addressed.”

Gavin said the city is currently negotiating with the service provider to safeguard the data collected during the payment processing by ensuring that only the minimum required for the transaction is collected and that personal data is kept secure and used in accordance with Canadian legislation.

Once this is addressed, the expectation is the system will be able to be launched. In the meantime, there are a number of ways the public can pay.

For more information, visit Charlottetown.ca.