Delaware leans into payment processing to ‘leapfrog’ digital services

Payment processing is the central focus for Delaware’s digital government efforts.

Greg Lane, the state’s chief information officer, said that in developing the state’s “Go DE” digital services platform, it aligned efforts with the Office of the State Treasurer, which was in the process of changing how it accepts online payments.

“[That switch] requires every agency with a website that takes payment to switch from the current provider to the new one,” Lane said. “What we did was put a payment engine to have all those sites re-coded to call the engine, and connected the engine to the payment processor.”

The new payment engine saved “a lot of work,” and will simplify any needed future changes to payment processors, Lane said.

He also said that integrating the engine into the state’s digital services platform is allowing agencies that have never offered online payments to “leapfrog” the digital transition and be ready to take online payments that are secure and compliant with regulations.

Go DE, which features more than 100 digital services, is designed prepare the state to deploy chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools in the coming years, Lane said.