For IOUs, electric co-ops, municipal water and gas, retail electricity providers in deregulated states, and telecom utilities.
US utilities deal with millions of bill payment, balance, and payment plan calls every quarter. Investor-owned utilities, electric co-ops, water districts, gas utilities, retail electricity providers in deregulated markets, municipal utilities — the customer base is huge and the call volume scales with weather, with billing cycles, and with the parts of the year when arrears tend to climb.
On top of that, you're already living with regulators. State PUCs and PSCs. FERC for the wholesale layer. State consumer protection rules on disconnection notices, payment plans, and shutoff moratoria. And in many states, hardship customer protections that drive how aggressively you can chase arrears at all. PCI DSS gets stacked on top — the moment a CSR reads a card number aloud, your CIS, your call recording vendor, and your contact center stack are all in scope.
A breach involving customer payment data plus billing data plus the regulated service record is the kind of incident that pulls in your state PUC, your state attorney general, and your federal regulator at the same time. Removing card data from the contact center is one of the cleanest things you can do for both your PCI scope and your regulator-facing risk register.
Paytia sits between your phone system and your payment gateway. The customer keys their card on their own keypad while your CSR stays on the line, talking through the bill, the payment plan, or the arrears arrangement. Our DTMF masking replaces the keypad tones with a flat signal in real time — the CSR hears nothing identifiable, the call recording stays clean, and the card data goes straight to your existing gateway (Stripe, Chase Payment Solutions, Authorize.Net, Adyen, Worldpay US, and others).
The platform sits in front of your CIS — Oracle Customer Care & Billing, SAP IS-U, Cayenta, Itineris, NorthStar, or your in-house billing system. Payment outcomes and references post back into the customer record automatically, so collections, customer care, and field operations all see the same data. Reconciliation just works.
For arrears recovery, the platform supports tokenized scheduled payments. The CSR agrees the plan during the call, captures the card once, and the schedule runs automatically. Failed payments trigger reminders with embedded payment links, so the customer can self-cure without another agent call. That changes the economics of collections — particularly for retail electric providers and municipal utilities where collections cost-per-account is the headline number.
Customers call to pay electric, gas, water, or telecom bills — CSRs stay on the line without ever seeing or hearing the card number.
Tokenized scheduled payments run automatically once the plan is agreed. Failed payments self-cure through automated link reminders.
Prepaid electric and water customers top up by phone or 24/7 IVR. Top-ups post directly to the meter through your billing platform.
When weather drives a call surge, the cloud-hosted platform scales without capacity planning, and seasonal CSRs are payment-ready in minutes.
SAQ A
Down from SAQ D
24/7
IVR self-service bill pay
Tokenized
Arrears plans run themselves
Weeks
Live with most utilities
Paytia is the secure payment capture layer. Your underlying utility service, billing, disconnection notice rules, and customer protections under your state PUC stay with you exactly as they do today. We don't touch billing or service provisioning — we just keep card data off your call recordings and out of your CIS when customers pay over the phone. State PUC examiners actually like the separation: the regulated service record and the payment record stay distinct, which makes audits cleaner.
Yes — and arrears recovery is one of the strongest ROI cases in utilities. The CSR agrees a repayment schedule with the customer during a single call; the card is captured securely; tokenized payments then run on the agreed dates without anyone having to chase. Failed payments trigger automated reminders with embedded payment links. Compared to manual outbound dunning, customers self-cure on far higher volumes, and your collections team gets back hours per agent per day.
Yes. Paytia sits in front of your CIS rather than inside it. CSRs work in CC&B, IS-U, Cayenta, Itineris, NorthStar, or whatever utility billing platform you run, and the Paytia portal is a separate browser tab that posts the payment outcome and reference back into the customer record. There's no platform integration project to wait for — most utilities are live in two to four weeks. We've also done this with municipal utility billing systems and several in-house CIS deployments.
Yes. Prepaid utilities — common with small municipal systems and some retail electricity providers in deregulated states — are a high-volume use case. Customers ring in, key their card on their own keypad, and the top-up posts to their account through your billing platform. CSRs stay on the line throughout but never hear the digits. The 24/7 IVR option means customers can also top up at midnight without an agent, which matters when your customers run their balance close to zero.
The platform is cloud-hosted with no per-seat licensing and no capacity planning. When your bills go out and call volumes triple overnight, or a storm event drives a spike in payment-deferral requests, the platform handles it — and so do your agents, because there's nothing for them to install or learn beyond what they're already doing. Multi-channel collection through phone, IVR, and payment links also takes pressure off the contact center during the peak.
See Paytia on a bill-pay or arrears flow that looks like yours. Most utilities are live in two to four weeks.
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