payitSt.Louis named among 2021 Smart 50 Awards Recipients

PayIt’s partnership with the St. Louis Collector of Revenue’s Office on payitSt.Louis has been named a recipient of the Smart 50 Awards for 2021. The annual Smart 50 Awards, in partnership with Smart Cities Connect, Smart Cities Connect Foundation and US Ignite, honors the most innovative, influential and municipal-scale projects globally.

The Smart 50 nomination was focused on the implementation, benefits and successes of payitSt.Louis, an online payments solution for the people of St. Louis. payitSt.Louis allows residents to easily pay property taxes, earnings taxes, utility bills and court violations/tickets all from one platform.

Through this partnership, the Collector of Revenue’s office was able to launch payitSt.Louis at no cost to the city, with the flexibility for rapid deployment of new services and features. This proved critical in the early months of 2020 as the global COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Collector of Revenue’s Office saw an urgency to shift traditionally in-person services online. With tax deadlines approaching, the scalable technology that payitSt.Louis was built on allowed the city to launch an online payment collection page allowing taxpayers to safely make their earnings tax payments from any internet or data-enabled device.

Hear from St. Louis Collector of Revenue’s Rachel McClure, Assistant Collector and Amir Softic, IT Manager on how their agency spun up new services with PayIt in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With over $775,000 in online tax payments collected in its first three months (June – September 2020) and over $5.2 million to date, the city of St. Louis plans to continue offering this safe and effective method of collecting tax payments for their citizens.

The ease of scalability that payitSt.Louis provides the city is what makes it truly influential. Since the initial launch in 2016, the city has collected over $142.73 million in total online revenue, seeing 109% year-to-date growth and will continue to execute their vision of a unified citizen experience.

Winners will be honored at the Smart 50 Awards Gala in Washington, D.C, this October, hosted in conjunction with Smart Cities Connect Conference.

To view the full list of the 50 winning projects, visit: https://fall.smartcitiesconnect.org/Smart50Awards/