Frequently Asked Questions

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Does Promise offer payment plans or loans?

We offer payment plans, not loans.

Do you distribute the aid money yourself?

In certain cases, we directly distribute aid money. Ideally, we use funds from the state, qualify individuals for aid, and then apply it directly to their utility bills if they're eligible.

Do you determine eligibility for benefits?

We determine eligibility for benefits by collecting requirements from state, federal, and municipal programs and evaluating if individuals meet these criteria. In some cases, these requirements grant categorical eligibility (e.g., participation in one program like SNAP/Food Stamps automatically qualifies a household for another program).

Do you manage the debt (are we a lender or a manager of debt)?

We do not manage debt, nor are we a lender.

Can Promise integrate with both customer-based and premise-based CIS structures?

Yes, Promise has experience integrating with customer-based and premise-based CIS structures.

How long does it take Promise to integrate with a client’s CIS?

Promise has created a simple integration process that can be completed by your staff in approximately eighty hours time across a six-week period. Promise provides a skilled and experienced project manager, as well step-by-step guidance from our software engineers to ensure a simple and efficient integration process.

How does Promise integrate with a client’s existing customer payment portal?

Promise exchanges files with your CIS through a secure data exchange process to update account statuses daily.

Once a customer is enrolled in a PromisePay plan, how does communication to our customers occur regarding PromisePay payment plans? Does our CIS need to handle communications?

As part of the PromisePay payment plan service, Promise handles all outbound SMS communications to enrolled customers related to their plans. SMS communication related to PromisePay plans is managed and executed by Promise, not the utility. The SMS communication covers many topics, including the following: receipts for all plan payments, confirmations for plan changes, plan payment reminders and notifications regarding plan status (i.e. enrolled, completed, canceled).

Does Promise provide checklists and/or guidelines for a client to use during their CIS integration process?

Yes. In addition to providing a project manager and a team of software engineers to support our clients during the integration process, Promise will share a detailed Integration and Reference Guide for our clients to utilize during the integration process. Additionally, Promise project managers coordinate directly with our clients to develop a schedule of tasks, with agreed upon completion dates, to keep the integration process on schedule and progressing.

What error handling has Promise built into the integration process?

Promise has a series of internal processes and data quality checks are run against all incoming and outgoing files. These checks catch anomalies and errors, which are flagged to the engineering team.

How does a client’s CIS keep track of PromisePay payment plans?

At a high level, a client’s CIS and PromisePay will create, track, and manage PromisePay payment plans through the automated daily exchange of four flat files. Promise will provide the data fields that each of the four files shall contain. Detailed field definitions are provided by Promise, in advance to our clients and are normal data fields (like customer name and balance) that our clients’ CIS already contains. Additionally, Promise also provides our clients with all the required CIS processing criteria and related CIS processing logic to ensure the transfer and integration of all the correct data both to/from Promise. The client’s CIS ingests updates from Promise to reflect payments and payment plans. Payment files can be provided in a client’s given CIS’s native file format, allowing existing payment processes to be leveraged. Plan enrollments, cancellations, and updates are ingested by a client’s CIS to ensure that their customer accounts are protected from water service disconnections. On Promise’s side, our PromisePay system ingests updates from the two daily files we receive from our clients. Updated customer balance information is ingested by our PromisePay system to ensure that the PromisePay system knows which customers are eligible for PromisePay, their total and past due balances, their current bill due date, and if the customer has made a payment directly to the utility (our client).

Does Promise have integration testing plans? If so, could they be shared with the client?

The Promise project plan includes a testing plan that outlines testing required in both development and pre-production phases. Promise shares the testing plan with our clients early during the integration process for their review and edification.

Do clients need additional infrastructure to integrate with Promise?

Generally there's no additional infrastructure needed by our clients specifically for Promise beyond the staging and/or testing servers you already have set up. A client may decide to set up a specific testing environment for the Promise integration; however, that generally isn't necessary because the development Promise does can be deployed in our clients' standard staging/testing environments. Promise does not require any additional storage from our clients.

Do clients need to set up a test server to integrate with Promise?

Clients do not need a specific test server for integration with Promise as Promise assumes that our clients have existing test environments they can use. When Promise provisions the infrastructure on our side, we provision both test and production environments. This allows Promise to connect them to their respective environments on our clients’ side.

In providing a file with account numbers and current amounts owed, could our organization send an initial file with everything and subsequent files that only report changes?

Standard practice is to send full files in order to guarantee that no changes are missed. Sending files that only contain changes are prone to issues around weekends, holidays and other disruptions to normal business procedures.

How would data be reconciled and how frequently?

Best practice is for the client to send an exception report with each integration covering any change in Promise enrollment. Additionally, we recommend performing ad-hoc comparisons of the full list. The frequency of these ad-hoc comparisons can be adjusted based on whether or not errors are discovered (and if so, how many). Generally, these will decrease over time.

Is there an automated or manual quality assurance process to ensure a customer’s PromisePay plan is established correctly?

Promise institutes a series of automated and manual quality assurance checks to ensure that each PromisePay plan is accurate. Utilizing data provided by our clients, Promise establishes PromisePay plans for our clients’ customers. PromisePay allows individual customers to select the terms of their PromisePay plan based on options Promise provides that are in accordance with the PromisePay business rules we establish with our clients. As the customer is setting up their plan, Promise performs automated checks to ensure that the customer’s data matches the expected form and that the values provided are within the bounds communicated by the client. During Promise’s engagement with our clients we may discover data inaccuracies such as out-of-date phone numbers, incorrect customer names, etc. In these cases, Promise allows the customer to update their information in the software and this information can be sent back to our client. Clients that work with Promise often find that their data is more accurate as a result. In cases where data needs to be verified by our client (e.g. the customer thinks their total balance is incorrect), Promise allows customers to raise these inaccuracies in the software and we send a report back to the utility for response. Most data inaccuracies are caught by software through testing or through customers updating their information or raising a concern. In addition to the automated measures we allow for manual intervention. For example, a customer can call or text Promise Customer Service directly to update their information or raise a concern.

How does the utility shield customers enrolled in PromisePay from collection activities?

PromisePay payment plans may be reflected in client’s CIS as pay plans. Pay plans provide a simple option for allowing customer balances to be protected until a certain date without the complexity of modeling every future payment.

If a client decides to add an additional Promise product post-integration of PromisePay, what additional integration steps are needed?

Generally, adding additional Promise services after PromisePay integration has occurred is simple and does not require a full re-integration. While the additional steps depend on which additional services are procured, it could be as simple as adding additional columns to the data files that are already exchanged between Promise and our client. For additional details on what additional integration steps may be required for a given Promise service, please contact your Promise project manager.

What security measures does Promise have in place to protect utility and customer data from inappropriate access or theft?

Security is of the utmost importance at Promise, and is core to all technology that Promise builds. Promise maintains multiple audited accreditations including PCI DSS, SOC 1 type 2, and SOC 2 type 2 in order to test our internal controls against rigorous standards and provide assurance that our security practices are working to protect customer data. Promise ensures the confidentiality of customer data using encryption at every stage, at rest and in-transit, in addition to numerous other measures to maintain a defense-in-depth approach to security. Promise employees have worked in the Federal National Security and Defense spaces and bring the same security standards to bear in their work with our clients.

Does Promise collect customers’ Personal Identification Information?

Promise verifies name and account number during a customer’s PromisePay enrollment process, while also confirming the customer’s preferred cell phone number for contact. Promise does not sell or share any customer data, except in order to provide the PromisePay service to our client. During checkout, we also collect non-PII information including payment plan length and preferred payment cadence along with method of payment information. All information related to the payment method is transferred directly to the payment processor and is not stored with Promise.

Does Promise share customer data with any third parties?

Promise uses cloud hosting providers as well as a number of sub-processors to enable our software. These service providers are assessed for security and compliance before use and as part of Promise's compliance audit program. Promise minimizes the data shared with each sub-processor throughout the product to only that data needed to perform a specific function. Beyond the use of sub-processors, Promise does not share customer data.

Is Promise PCI-DSS compliant?

Yes, Promise is PCI-DSS compliant and would be happy to provide our certificate.

Does Promise have their current Soc 2 Type 2 report? If yes, could it be shared?

Yes, Promise has a current SOC 2 Type 2 report performed by an third-party auditor that can be shared under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)

Does Promise own the data when the city decides to terminate the contract?

Promise’s clients retain ownership of all data that they provide to Promise. Upon request of a client, Promise will destroy all data provided by the client. Promise retains the right to use client data to improve its product, as long as such improvements are not derived from the use of Personal Identification Information. Promise also retains the right to publish broadly applicable learnings and insights derived from client data that has been aggregated and de-identified. Promise retains logs and recordings of its direct interactions with end-users of its platform (our client’s customers) and may retain those records per its data retention policies, even after it has destroyed all data provided to Promise directly by the client. Additionally, customers who choose to sign up for payment plans or other services through Promise may choose to grant Promise the right to contact them about other services.

What tools are provided to identify and prevent payment fraud?

Promise employs numerous measures both internally and through our payment processors to detect and prevent payment fraud. By using machine learning and advanced detection as part of the payment verification process, Promise safeguards the integrity of client payments throughout the Platform.