Payment Processing Services

The vendor is required to provide financial payment processing services to include, but not limited to, credit card processing, recurring payments, and electronic check (e-check) payments and any other payment types the qualified firm provides.
- General
•    Provide a competitively based discount for the processing of all four (4) major credit cards: visa, Mastercard, discover, and American Express. 
•    provide a competitively based discount for the processing of debit cards, e-check and any other payment types provided by the contractor. 
•    Provide payment authentication service to verify the identity of cardholders to prevent fraud and protect from chargebacks. 
•    Provide account verification service to validate the bank routing number and account number for e-check and automated clearing house (ach) submissions.
•    Provide options that will allow payments to be made from computers and mobile devices to include but not limited to cell phones, google pay, apple pay, mobile wallets, etc.
•    Provide payment, settlement, chargeback review, and e-check return process and refunding services.
•    All fees such as installation, enrollment, license, maintenance fees, etc., must be clearly identified in fees and cost of services. 
•    Convenience fees will be passed directly to county customers.
•    Provide an itemized customer receipt that includes the details of each item purchased, the subtotal of the transaction, the convenience fee, and the total dollar amount of the completed transaction.
•    Provide daily settlement of merchant accounts with details on the timing of settlement and any daily cutoff times.
•    Deposit payments into specified county bank accounts by merchant id.
•    Make next business day deposits for credit cards, e-check, and any other payment types after settlement into the county’s specified bank accounts.
•    Provide an online resource for daily transaction and account reconciliation reports by major credit card, e-check, and other payment types as well as for retrieving, reviewing, printing, and downloading transactions, settlement data and monthly statements in format that both the contractor and the community development departments agree upon.
•    Provide multiple user access to online reporting, with a dedicated system administrator to control access.
•    Provide an application that is compatible with the county’s electronic land management (Tyler technologies enterprise permitting and licensing software) (system) and adaptable to any changes to software.
•    Provide multiple web environments: three (3) payment and reporting environments; one (1) for production, one (1) for training, and one (1) for testing purposes.
•    Provide a disaster recovery plan. 
•    The disaster recovery plan shall identify critical business processes, infrastructure, data, and strategies for recovering those processes in the event of a system failure. 
•    The plan shall also identify the county resources and personnel necessary to execute the disaster recovery plan.
•    Provide fraud protection plan with gateways, applications, and any other software.
•    Provide a detailed security plan for cloud-based service.
•    Provide fraud protection plan with gateways, applications, and any other software. 
•    Provide business continuity plans for emergencies, system failures etc. 
•    Provide and maintain an application programming interface (API).
•    Provide a payment confirmation receipt for each payment made that will load to a county secured repository.
- Data requirements
•    The solution's integration capabilities shall enable an integrated enterprise where common business data elements are easily shared across organizational units to eliminate redundant data entry while adhering to county, state, and federal security and privacy restrictions.
•    The solution's components shall be committed to an advanced approach to interoperability based on a SOA aligned with county and industry standards and the vision for interoperability. 
•    The solution shall be able to support a wide variety of integration patterns including, but not limited to:
o    Data look-up and retrieval
o    Data look-up with services provided by other applications
o    Bulk data transfer to other systems
•    The solution shall be able to support application to application (a2a) synchronous and asynchronous messaging using a wide variety of integration patterns including, but not limited to:
o    Web services (WS)*: based on core web services standards such as simple object access protocol (soap), web services description language (WSDL), and universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI), as well as support for implementing higher level standards such as WS-security and web services interoperability (WS-I) as needed. 
o    Lightweight representational state transfer (RESTFULL) APIS: support extensible markup language (xml) and JavaScript object notation (json)-based message processing, http, and extensible hyper-text markup language (XHTML).
•    The solution shall avoid ad hoc point-to-point application integrations where all internal and external integrations go through centralized API gateway and enterprise service bus layers. 
•    The integration platform(s) provides the features needed to support the reliable operation of services, including:
o    Online cataloging of services and associated artifacts; 
o    A single point of controlled access for promoting, publishing, and searching for services; 
o    A platform for code programs to find, bind to, and invoke the execution of a service implementation; 
o    Monitoring and controlling the routing of messages, inquiring about the status of messages, and addressing exceptions; and 
o    Control deployment and versioning of services.
•    The solution services shall be reviewed, classified, and cataloged before use under service categories such as presentation, process, business, data, access, or utility. 
•    The solution shall allow the publication of services for use by different types and classes of service consumers.
•    The solution services repository shall include metadata governing service utilization, such as the service category, owner, version, revision history, availability, volume, max message size, security attributes, service-level agreement (SLA)s, and logging requirements. 
•    The service life cycle status shall also be specified, for example, operational or deprecated.
•    The solution shall develop and integrate services using standardized WS formats based on logical representations of business objects rather than native application data structures to reduce the number of required data transformations and processing time.
•    The solution shall provide reliable, once-only delivery of messages (guarantee of reliable and non-repetitive delivery) and perform source-to-destination integrity checks to exchange data and alert appropriate parties with issues. 
•    The solution shall provide reliability for integration message flows utilizing capabilities such as load balancing, high availability, fault tolerance, failover, in-order delivery, transaction support, execution prioritization, and message prioritization. 
•    The solution's design shall allow the overall system to continue operating despite the failure or unavailability of one (1) or more individual integration-related solution components.

- Contract Period/Term: 4 years
- Optional Pre-Proposal Conference Date: October 27, 2025
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: October 30, 2025