Ocean Springs officials warn residents about using third party payment companies

By Annie Johnson | June 24, 2019 at 8:05 PM CDT - Updated June 26 at 7:28 PM

OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. (WLOX) - Although it may be convenient, city officials are warning residents about using third party payment companies to pay their utility bills.

Many people have recently started using these companies because of their easy usage with legitimate companies. Instead of having to type their payment information, the funds are transferred directly from the user’s bank.

But officials say some of the companies are not transferring payments immediately from the user’s bank account to the creditor resulting in late payments. This can result in late fees or disruption of services, which falls back on the customer.

The city stressed Doxo.com is not an authorized vendor to accept utility payments due to Ocean Springs, and officials will not refund any fees incurred by using the company.

Doxo.com reached out to WLOX and released this statement:

Doxo helps our more than 2.5 million users pay more than 50,000 billers across the country, and most of those payments are from mobile phones. Our service is consumer focused and allows people to pay in the ways they prefer and with protections they don’t get from any given biller website - like paying with ApplePay and account overdraft protection. Certainly we don’t want to see any late payments, so we make it very clear in our user experience as to how payments are sent and when the user can expect to see that payment delivered. In the rare case of issues, we offer 24x7 customer support via phone, chat, or email to get quick resolution. In addition, we invite billers, including the City of Ocean Springs, to receive payments from doxo via direct deposit - at no charge. We talk to hundreds of billers every month, and found that 1-2% don’t understand or just don’t like the changes happening in mobile and bill pay. Our goal is to help billers embrace those changes and expand the options they make available to customers

Roger Parks with Doxo.com