PayItSt.Louis Receives Smart 50 Award as Collector of Revenue and PayIt Host Panel

Taking the stage in front of more than 250 city, municipality and federal leaders, St. Louis Collector of Revenue Gregory F.X. Daly accepted a Smart 50 Award for the payitSt.Louis digital payment solution on Oct. 20 at the Smart Cities Connect Fall Conference and Expo in Washington, D.C.

Smart 50 Awards honor the most innovative and influential projects that transform communities. payitSt.Louis was nominated based on its implementation as well as the immediate benefits and successes it provided for the Collector of Revenue’s Office.

An online payment solution, payitSt.Louis, allows citizens to pay property taxes, earnings taxes, utility bills and court violations/tickets from a single platform using a digital wallet. Citizens can also set up automatic payments for recurring bills and create reminder notifications for due dates.

Granted in partnership with Smart Cities Connect, Smart Cities Connect Foundation and US Ignite, the Smart 50 Award was presented just hours after Collector Daly spoke on a panel discussion entitled “How the St. Louis Collector of Revenue’s office created an all-inclusive, digital experience to better serve their constituents.” Daly was joined by Assistant Collector Rachel McClure and Information Technology Manager Amir Softic to share how implementing PayIt’s electronic payment solutions has improved the city’s revenue collection and disbursement, IT efficiency, operations and constituent satisfaction. Since employing these easy-to-use, mobile-friendly options, the city has recorded year-over-year increases in adoption and revenue collection, with over $150 million in online revenue collected to date—the kind of transformative benefits that earns Smart 50 nominations and, more importantly, creates positive change in communities.

These agile adaptations were made with the needs of both citizens and agency employees in mind at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020, with tax deadlines approaching making rapid deployment a necessity as traditional in-person services became more complex in order to follow public health guidelines and recommendations. Introducing the scalable technology that payitSt.Louis was built on allowed the city to launch an online payment collection page and empowered taxpayers to make secure payments from any internet or data-enabled device, tallying over $775,000 in online tax payments collected in its first three months (June – September 2020).