Madison’s Approach to Secure, Efficient Government Payments
Tyler Podcast Episode 138, Transcript
The Tyler Tech Podcast explores a wide range of complex, timely, and important issues facing communities and the public sector. Expect approachable tech talk mixed with insights from subject matter experts and a bit of fun. Each episode highlights the people, places, and technology making a difference. Give the podcast a listen today and subscribe.
Show Notes:
In this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast, Jeff Dempsey, financial systems analyst for the city of Madison, Wisconsin, shares how the city modernized its payment systems to improve security, efficiency, and the experience for both residents and staff — a transformation that earned Madison a 2025 Tyler Excellence Award (TEA).
Recorded live at Tyler Connect 2025 in San Antonio, the conversation explores how Madison addressed PCI compliance challenges and outdated hardware by streamlining payments across in-person, online, and phone channels. Jeff walks through the city’s transition to a more connected payments ecosystem, including the role Tyler Payments, Resident Access, and Utility Access played in creating real-time visibility, simplifying reconciliation, and reducing reliance on disconnected tools.
Jeff also highlights the behind-the-scenes work that supported the rollout, from coordinating stakeholders and upgrading hardware to managing change for both staff and the community. The results include faster payment processing, significant growth in autopay adoption, improved cash management, reduced manual effort, and a more secure, user-friendly experience for residents.
Whether you support finance, IT, or digital services in government, this episode offers practical insight into modernizing payment operations, strengthening security, and using integrated solutions to create measurable efficiency gains across the organization.
This episode also spotlights Tyler Connect 2026, where innovation and collaboration take center stage. Taking place April 7-10 at The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. Connect brings together public sector professionals from across the country to explore new solutions, share ideas, and strengthen communities. It’s a week dedicated to learning, connection, and imagining what’s possible for the future of government technology. Explore registration details and early bird pricing in the show notes to start planning your Connect 2026 experience.
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Transcript:
Jeff Dempsey: Tyler Payments has just been amazing, the efficiencies that we’ve gained through Tyler Payments. So, when a payment comes in, whether it’s through point of sale, through cashiering, or online through resident access or utility access or even an IVR phone payment, we can see that payment instantaneously.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast, where we explore the trends, technologies, and people shaping the public sector. I’m your host, Josh Henderson. Thanks so much for joining us. In this episode recorded live at Tyler Connect 2025 in San Antonio, we’re highlighting how modernizing everyday processes can have a powerful impact on government operations. For the city of Madison, Wisconsin, updating its payment systems wasn’t just about making transactions easier. It was about improving security, reducing complexity, and creating a better experience for both residents and staff.
Joining us to share how the city achieved that transformation is Jeff Dempsey, financial systems analyst for the city of Madison and a 2025 Tyler Excellence Award winner. Jeff has so many great things to share, so let’s dive right in.
Jeff, congrats to you and for to the city of Madison for the TEA win, and thanks for joining me on the Tyler Tech Podcast today.
Jeff Dempsey: Well, thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here, and thanks for congratulating us on the award. It was really a great honor to receive the Tyler Excellence Award.
Josh Henderson: And very well deserved as well. Let’s start with where this journey began.
So, can you tell me what were some of the key challenges Madison was facing with its previous payment processing systems and resident portals?
Jeff Dempsey: So, our previous payment processor, there was definitely limitations largely due to the hardware that we were using with it. Limitations to the point where we had fallen out of PCI compliance briefly. So, we definitely had to make a change when it came to our payment processor. We use Tyler Cashiering as well. It’s one of the many Tyler products that we use at the city of Madison.
At that point in time, and I think even to this day, your options for the payment processor you use in conjunction with the newer versions of cashiering are somewhat limited. So, we definitely explored the various options. But, you know, after reviewing the options, Tyler Payments was a no brainer for us. That was the way to go.
So that was really what drove our payment change, you know, was, getting back into PCI compliance. That was the main motivating factor there. As far as the customer portals, we had online payment portals, but after we updated our payment processor, we were also in the midst of transitioning our utility billing and tax billing over to EERP. So right around the same time, this was like 2022, when we went live with utility billing and tax billing and EERP, we went ahead and stood up the resident access and utility access portals, and those are far better than their predecessors that we were using at the city.
Josh Henderson: Now let’s kind of build on what you have just mentioned there with my next question.
But when you decided it was time to modernize, what were your main goals for the new solution, and what did you want to make better both internally and for your residents?
Jeff Dempsey: Well, the PCI compliance piece was obviously a huge one. So, you know, PCI compliance, it ensures security for the customers. You know, it’s a much more secure way for them pay. So that was definitely one of the driving things we were trying to achieve was, you know, a more secure payment option for our customers and internally, always seeking to find efficiencies. And that was really one of the big reasons we went with Tyler Payments was because of the streamlined, seamless integration with ERP.
Josh Henderson: And now let’s talk about that implementation a little bit. How did that process go and what lessons would you share about getting started with a project like this? Sure, sure.
Jeff Dempsey: So, there’s a few things going on there. One was implementing Tyler Payments. I have to say that went extremely smooth.
It was almost easy, one of the easier implementations I’ve ever been involved in. Know, there was a little bit of training on the features and understanding how it worked, like a day maybe of training. And then doing the cutover, you know, because we first went live with the payments with Tyler Cashiering. So that was a little tricky just because it involved installing new hardware.
We have 50 cashiering stations scattered all the way around throughout the city. So, we had to go off, you know, out to all the various remote sites and, you know, install the new credit card readers, which wasn’t difficult. It was just kind of a lot of logistics and coordinating. As far as people looking to take on this type of project, you know, it’s just important to involve all the stakeholders very early on, have a very clear timeline and plan, make sure everybody knows what they’re responsible for, you know, just coordinating with everybody involved.
You know, I work for the finance department, but we also had to involve our IT department for a lot of it, and of course, Tyler Technologies support folks. So that’s mainly with the payments, you know, implementing that utility billing or transitioning our utility billing and tax billing, that was a whole another animal. Those were more labor intensive implementations. You know, they were like yearlong projects or longer.
The utility billing in particular, it took us almost three years from start to go live, and there is a lot of reasons for that. One, our utility billing is pretty complex. It’s for water. We don’t bill for electricity or gas.
It’s just primarily water, but we call it a municipal services bill because we’re also billing for other various services. So, building out all of the coding within ERP is just a lot of work. So, it was really complex. But the payments implementation, on the other hand, that was really smooth.
And then standing up the resident access and utility access portals, again, that was extremely easy, I would say. Those portals are very intuitive and user friendly, both from an end user or customer’s point of view and from an administrative point of view. The setup and administration of those portals is pretty simple.
Josh Henderson: I feel like, you know, you hear that a lot. It’s like sometimes you got to take baby steps. Sometimes, you know, you have to understand that it’s a marathon. It’s not a sprint.
When you’re updating legacy systems, it, you know, it does take some time, but the payoff ultimately is what you’re definitely looking at.
Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
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Jade Champion: Join us April 7-10 at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas for an unforgettable week of learning, collaboration, and connection.
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Jade Champion: Visit tylertech.com/connect to register today or click the link in our show notes.
Josh Henderson: We’ll see you at Tyler Connect 2026 where we empower, collaborate, and imagine what’s possible for the public sector in Vegas.
Jade Champion: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Josh Henderson: Obviously, too, this wasn’t just about internal efficiency, working in government. It you know, it’s about the residents. That’s ultimately what you’re making these changes for. So, in terms of resident convenience and making that front and center, what are some of the ways this new system has made it easier for community members to make payments?
Jeff Dempsey: So, in addition to the online payment portal, so for utility billing, it’s utility access as an online payment platform. In addition to that, we also have IVR phone lines, so interactive voice recognition, I think it stands for IVR. So, they can pay by phone if they want, and that feeds into the Tyler payments.
But the online, the utility access portal in particular is, in my opinion, extremely easy to use. It’s intuitive, as I mentioned before. Yeah, so it’s just a very convenient and now a much more secure way for our customers to pay. And there’s some great features in that utility access portal.
We also use the Tyler smart meter feature, which will provide a graph of your household’s or water consumption that you can view daily, almost real time data, you can see and you can set up alerts for consumption threshold alerts or leak alerts. You can set up autopay. You can schedule a payment through there. So, it’s just a great and well, let me add this.
The numbers speak to how our customers feel about it because the adoption has been immense. We have roughly 80,000 utility billing customers. I just looked this morning before I headed over, and we’re averaging 44,000 payments per month through that portal, and 40,000 of those are autopay customers. Prior to transitioning over to utility access and utility billing through EERP, we had under 20,000 customers on autopay.
So, in a matter of two, three years, we more than doubled the number of customers that are on autopay. So, I think that speaks largely to how our customers feel about it. Just the fact the heavy use and adoption of it speaks volumes.
Josh Henderson: You mentioned the graph for water consumption, and I back home where I am from in Maine, I have that for my water bill, and my wife and I were able to identify, oh, the water bill is going up every month.
There must be something wrong here. We identified where that problem was. We fixed it, and now our water bill graph has gone down. So, it’s nice to see that visually as well. But I’m curious to hear from you what kind of feedback you’ve heard from residents and how on how these changes have improved their overall experience.
Jeff Dempsey: I won’t lie; change is always hard. Some of our customers at the outset, we received some negative feedback, but it didn’t have anything to do with the technology so much as the inconvenience of having to re-enroll in autopay and learn how to use a new portal.
Josh Henderson: Change is hard.
Jeff Dempsey: It’s always hard. So, change management is always a big part of any sort of implementation project, both internally and externally. We did our best to communicate in advance, well in advance, you know, putting inserts into people’s bills, putting stuff out on their city websites to inform people that this change was coming. But nevertheless, you know, people complain about it and grumble, but that was pretty short lived, you know, once people kind of got settled and started using the new portal.
Since then, it’s been good. We received primarily positive feedback. People have actually thanked us for, you know, improving the online customer portal experience.
Josh Henderson: On the internal side, though, what impact has this had on your teams and processes, and how has this implementation and integration improved day-to-day operations for you and your teams?
Jeff Dempsey: Tyler Payments, it’s just been amazing. The efficiencies that we’ve gained through Tyler Payments.
It’s that integration and that streamline. So, when a payment comes in, whether it’s through, you know, point of sale through cashiering or online through resident utility access or even an IVR phone payment, we can see that payment instantaneously flow into EERP. So, it makes cash management and reconciliation just so much simpler. I mentioned the increase in our utility billing customers that are using autopay. I mean, that alone, it’s hard to put a precise number on it, but that’s, you know, going from 20,000 to 40,000, that’s half of our customers on autopay.
When a payment comes in, whether it’s in person, online, or by phone, we can see that payment instantaneously.
Jeff Dempsey
Financial Systems Analyst
City of Madison, Wisconsin
That creates a huge amount of time savings because previously, those payments would have either been coming in, people coming in, paying in person, and that takes time, you know, a couple minutes to process that transaction. A lot of them would have been coming in through a middleware system. Our IT set up middleware with the legacy system that would basically generate an output file of payments that had been received the prior day, and then somebody would either manually key that in the cashiering or sometimes we would use a lockbox import file. So, point being, increasing our autopay customers by that much has just saved a ton of time, I would easily hundreds of hours per year of labor hours are being saved just by making this switch over to Tyler payments and utility access.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. That’s new to me to hear that autopay is ultimately a huge time saver for your team, and that’s it makes perfect sense.
It’s great to hear. Now to sort of wrap things up, Jeff, as you look to the future, how do you see Madison continuing to benefit from this integrated ecosystem, and what advice would you give to others considering similar projects?
Jeff Dempsey: Well, we’re always looking to, wherever possible, kind of eliminate third-party systems. And we have departments using various software, but so we’re always examining that and seeing if we could possibly transition that over into a Munis module. So, we’re always looking for opportunities like that to gain efficiency.
Eliminating third-party software is beneficial to the city, to IT. It’s less, you know, software vendors we have to negotiate with and deal with, less platforms that need to be maintained. So, we’re always looking for opportunities to roll more stuff into the Tyler umbrella.
A good example, another thing, we recently stood up vendor access, which has been pretty cool. We’re still in kind of in the early stages, but it’s fully live and our vendors are adopting it a lot and we’re allowing them to submit invoices to us through the portal. And I think the vendors really appreciate that.
And that’s just another example of efficiencies that we’re gaining by using Tyler’s products. As far as advice for people that want to undertake a project like this, just do your homework. You know, definitely look at options that are out there, but sometimes the best option is the option you already have. And for us, that’s Tyler and EERP.
Josh Henderson: Jeff, thanks so much for sharing Madison’s story today.
Congratulations again on your Tyler Excellence Award, and, yeah, we hope to have you back on the show at some point in the future too.
Jeff Dempsey: It would be my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Josh Henderson: As we heard today, modernizing payment systems is about far more than upgrading hardware or updating portals.
For the city of Madison, it meant creating a secure, reliable, and user friendly experience that meets residents’ expectations while giving staff the tools they need to work more efficiently. Jeff shared how streamlining payments, strengthening PCI compliance, and integrating service portals have helped Madison simplify operations, reduce manual workloads, and deliver better service across the community. It’s the kind of thoughtful modernization that earned the city a 2025 Tyler Excellence Award. If you’d like to learn more about the solutions we discussed today, check out the show notes for additional resources, and we’d love to hear your feedback.
Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com. And be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show so you never miss an episode.
For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.