“The city doesn’t feel like we should have people’s bank information,” Nancy Jimenez, Santa Fe’s utility billing director, said in a recent interview. “The customer needs to pay their bills monthly however they want to handle it, not allow us to take money from their bank account.”
In the past, customers could give the city a voided check with their banking information and the city would pull their utility bills from their account monthly, Jimenez said. Now, customers are required to make their payments through the online platform Paymentus, which the division has been using since 2016.
The money can come from whichever account the customer was using previously, she said, “but it won’t be initiated by the city any longer.”
Jimenez said customers can set up a schedule through Paymentus to pay their bill automatically every month.
If residents do not want to pay their bill online, they continue to have the option of writing the city a check each month and delivering it in person or by mail, she said. Customers can also pay in person at the utility billing office with a credit card or cash.
Jiminez said she believed the division was the only branch of the city that retained residents’ bank account information, and noted other agencies, including the Public Service Company of New Mexico, also use third-party processing for bill payments.
“It’s just a safer way of processing everything,” she said.
Eric Candelaria, director of the city’s Internet Technology and Telecommunications Department, said using third-party, cloud-based payment software has become “standard practice” because it removes the threat of a ransomware attack from the city, something he said the ITT department is “constantly” working to guard the city against.
If hackers “were to get into our system, we wouldn’t have to worry too much about them getting a hold of banking information for the constituents,” he said, because it is no longer stored on the city’s network.
Candelaria said making sure residents’ information is safe is a top priority for his team.
“They should believe that any services that the city provides, that they pay for, that they’re being secured to the best of their ability,” he said. “And the previous administration and the new administration take that very seriously.”
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