It also passes from the increase of digital payments in the Public Administration (PA), the digitization path of the country. Because if we consider the numbers of users – citizens, businesses and organizations – who interface with the Public Administrations on a daily basis, making the payments of taxes, penalties and charges smarter and with solutions that are always more within your reach means activating a club. virtuous affecting hundreds of thousands of transactions.
“Digital payments in the PA are growing“, explains Marco Torri, head of the Public Administration Advisory & Sales Team of Nexi, who adds: “If we look at ‘Pago PA’, the digital platform that at a national level allows payments to be made to the Public Administration, volumes grow double-digit. In the first ten months of 2021 we had 142 million transactions and an equivalent value of almost 26 billion euros: we are + 71% compared to the same period in 2020 and more than double compared to 2019 “.
“The one that has to grow – observes the expert – is the use of digital payments in local public administration: only a small part of payments, in fact, originates from a web portal, an app or a pos terminal located in a local administration “.
“The correlation between the digitization of the country and the spread of digital payments is an established fact – continues Torri – The European Commission each year draws up a ranking among European countries to measure the digital health status of these countries, Italy is always at the bottom of this ranking. Who is on top? Normally there are the countries of Northern Europe – Finland, Sweden, Denmark – which not surprisingly are the countries where there is the highest diffusion of digital payments “.
And the advantages of digital payments are for everyone: citizens and administrations.
“If you think about it – thinks Torri – the payment of a tax or a service is probably one of the most frequent moments of interaction between citizens, businesses and the Public Administration: being able to digitize this moment, making it simpler and faster, but also more easily accountable, opens up a range of opportunities to make processes and procedures within the PA more efficient but also to improve the user experience. It is clear that paying a fine or a tax is never pleasant, being able to do it at home at any time of the day via smartphone certainly mitigates this disappointment “.
To support the PA in this digitization process, operators such as Nexi also do their part.
“Nexi’s mission is very simple: we want to make every payment digital because it’s simpler, safer and more practical for everyone”Remembers Torri. “To achieve this goal, we provide banks, merchants, companies but also Public Administrations with a wide range of payment services and instruments, with the aim of allowing these entities to offer their end customers a ‘easy and innovative payment experience ”.
Different solutions are proposed to the administrations, on which the design work is often long and complex, as the expert says: “On the acceptance side of the payment, for 3 years now, we are working to make the greatest possible number of payment channels and instruments available to public administrations, customers of our banks, even assuming the risk of working on innovative products and services for which at the time of launch there is not yet an established demand. This is what happened, for example, with the pos terminals integrated into the system ‘PA payment’: we started working on them at the end of 2018 when no body still required them. In the last 18 months we have installed over 2,000 of them, accompanying more than 300 public bodies in the process of digitizing their counter services “.
A commitment that cannot fail to involve the world of healthcare as well, given the period we are experiencing: “We have 30 work sites with as many healthcare companies to help them in the migration process to Pago PA. We have started the development of an application module for public sector companies to facilitate integrated e-commerce payments to ‘Pago PA’ and finally we are working on an account to account solution to bring open banking services to the Public Administration we have been working on for some time ”, explains Torri.
Ma one of the challenges on which this modernization process is played is training because, as Torri points out “if you have basic digital skills, you can make mature choices about the payment tools and channels to be adopted” and in this context Nexi is directly involved with various initiatives: “We haveorganized a cycle of 3 webinars which saw the participation of more than 600 people, mostly employees of local public administrations, where we talked about digital payments. Another initiative is the preparation of an information kit on digital payment solutions existing today that will be distributed by our banks to their client entities with the aim of starting joint discussions with the individual administrations and helping them in the digitization process. We are also working on a digital publication on a monthly basis and we have decided to bring the theme of digital payments into events and exhibitions now dedicated to the world of Public Administration, where up to now there has been little or no talk of digital payments. The idea – concludes the expert – is to exploit these very vertical events to talk with local administrations and convince them that the spread of digital payments is an opportunity to make their services more efficient, but also to improve the relationship with their citizens ” .
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