Payment options reduced

BY BRIAN O’CONNOR

Frontiersman.com

PALMER — In an era when customers gain new payment methods every day, the loss of one payment method might be considered shocking.

In the next two to six months, the Matanuska Electric Association will eliminate over-the-phone payments using credit cards with a customer service representative, company officials said. Telephone payments without a customer service representative — those using an automated touch-tone or voice-controlled system — will go ahead without interruption, and the local utility also rolled out last November an all-online and mobile payment system through SmartHub. A percentage of clients or number of payees using this method wasn’t immediately available.

The company’s customer service division made the decision as part of a larger audit by the credit card industry umbrella group PCI, and not to address a specific incident, according to MEA spokeswoman Julie Estey.

“The recommendation is that you decrease personal handling of credit card information as much as possible,” she said. “There are a lot of concerns about cyber security, not only the security of infrastructure like substations.”

“We thought we could improve on our practices,” Estey added.

Customers will also retain numerous other options for payment, she said.

“Customers can still come in and use our cashier,” she said. “We’ve just installed some of those new card readers where the customer does the work. We’re trying to take the customer serve representative out of the transaction.”

The move comes amid a string of cyber security headlines with potential impacts to Valley residents.

The Mat-Su Borough government website was hacked by a Tunisian militant group in July, and Community Health Systems, which owns and operates Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, suffered reportedly the largest health-sector data breach on record, at least one part of which traced back to a regional community health clinic.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com