Aspire Housing launched a new payment platform with Handepay, using the Universal Adapter to enable seamless integration with pre-existing systems and deliver benefits to both tenants and the organisation.
The project has increased payment processing time threefold, while reducing transaction fees and admin costs.
The Challenge
Aspire Housing came to us to help achieve their vision: a more efficient payment solution for income collection such as rent payment over the phone in their contact centre. They also wanted to futureproof the project by ensuring it had the potential to extend payment options to mobile and online channels in the future.
The project had clear objectives and success criteria:
- A simple payment system, open to all tenants for use with standard debit and credit cards and can cater for recurring payments
- Removal of a specific payment card which needs to be periodically replaced and is often forgotten
- Smarter, slicker and simpler way for the customer to pay their rent and removal of barriers like remembering a 19-digit number
- A payment system which would remove the need for manual data entry other than the card details from a single screen within the housing management system
- Automatic updates into, and auditing of, payment files within the housing management system
- Clear reduction in the amount of money spent collecting payments without affecting the amount collected
“The outcomes from this project has exceeded all expectations”
Paul Malkin – Income Collection and Generation Manager, Aspire Housing
Our Solution
Aspire Housing looked at existing payment providers within the housing market. The ability of a provider to integrate with current systems, and the ease of that integration was a key factor in selection, along with transaction and license costs. The selected payment solution also needed to have a functionally-rich set of APIs to ensure rich integration. Aspire Housing selected Handepay as their preferred option. An established solution outside of the housing sector, Handepay was relatively untested in terms of integration with housing management systems.
Aspire came to us for a solution and became pioneers in the use of our Universal Adapter for a mobile working project. We were confident that our Adapter toolkit would provide integration for a payment solution with functional APIs and scoped three critical streams of work to ensure successful delivery:
- Configuration of a Universal Adapter Connector that talks directly to Handepay APIs to download and process payment data
- Audit of the import process into the housing management system
- Customisation of housing management screens using the toolkit to allow end users to take seamless payments without jumping between screens and products
Our Results
Aspire’s willingness to try something new meant that we were able to work with them to meet, and surpass, their key success criteria for the project including:
- Annual savings on transaction fees
- Tripling speed of payment call handling
- Reducing in both licensing and administration costs