The third-party payment processors interact with Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service by calling the web services for account verification, one-time payment notification and auto pay setup, processing auto pay extract batch files from Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service, and sending auto pay confirmation and auto pay cancellation batch files to Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service.

The third-party payment process functionality consists of one-time payment processing and recurring automatic payment processing. This section provides an overview of these process flows:

For more details, refer to the Third-Party Payment Processing chapter in the user documentation.

A one-time payment is a one-off, non-recurring payment option where the third-party payment processing is authorized to collect a payment from a Utility customer's credit card or bank account.

One-time payments can be immediate or scheduled:

The base product provides an inbound web service C1-ThirdPartyOneTimePayNotification that receives one-time payment information from the third-party payment processor, and, based on the required action, creates/updates the payment in the system. This web service supports the following functions:

A third-party payment processing system can perform account verification prior to processing one-time payments and automatic payment enrollments. This verifies that the account exists, as well as gets specific information about the account, such as the account balance, due date, past due amount and existing auto pay information.

The base product provides an inbound web service C1-ThirdPartyVerifyAccount that receives an Account ID from the third-party payment processor and creates a Third Party Account Verification Task that is responsible for verifying the account. Base-supplied logic on this service task checks that the account exists and returns the account's balance, due date, past due amount (if any) and existing auto pay information (if any). Refer to the C1-ThirdPartyAcctVerifTask business object for more details.

When the system is integrated with a third-party payment processing system, customers who opt for automatic bill payment enroll through the third-party payment processing system, where payment information that includes credit card or bank account number are captured and stored. The third-party payment processing system sends a notification when it processes new or updated account auto pay information.

The base product provides an inbound web service C1-ThirdPartyAutoPaySetup that receives auto pay setup information and creates a Third Party Auto Pay Setup Task, which is responsible for creating or updating the account's auto pay information. Base-supplied logic on this service task adds an account auto pay option, updates an existing account auto pay option's details or cancels an existing account auto pay option by setting its end date to the designated date. Refer to the C1-ThirdPartyAutoPayTask business object for more details.

For customers enrolled to automatically pay bills through a third-party payment processing system, existing auto pay processing that occurs during bill completion applies. Refer to the Interfacing Automatic Payments To A Third Party section in the user documentation for more details.

The difference with automatic payment processing via third-party payment processing system is that the auto pay staging records are not sent directly to the financial institution. Since routing is different, a third-party payment processing system is associated with a distinct Auto Pay Source and Auto Pay Route Type. In addition, the Auto Pay Route Type for third-party payment processing needs to be configured with an Auto Pay Date Calculation algorithm, to calculate the auto pay’s extract date, payment date and GL distribution date accordingly. For instance, if the third-party payment processing processes the transaction on the same date that the transaction is sent, the algorithm can be configured such that the payment date is the same as the extract date.

Refer to the Define Auto Pay Sources and Auto Pay Route Types and Automatic Payment Dates sections in the user documentation for more details on this configuration.

Third-party automatic payment transactions are extracted using the Third Party Auto Pay Extract (C1-TAPEX) batch process. Refer to the Downloading Automatic Payments and Interfacing Them To The GL section in the user documentation for details on how this batch process fits into the auto pay batch process flows.

The third-party payment processing system sends two batch files containing auto pay confirmations and auto pay errors. These are processed by the Third Party Auto Pay Confirmations (C1-TAPDF) process and Third Party Auto Pay Cancellations (C1-TAPCN) process, respectively.