Outdoors Specialist PayIt Expands Digital Licensing With Its North Carolina Win

PayIt LLC announced on Tuesday it is processing payments for fishing licenses for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The deal, which was consummated March 20 but not announced immediately, is the latest for PayIt, an 11-year-old Kansas City, Mo.-based platform that specializes in digital payments for state and local governments, with a focus on recreational licenses.

The contract simplifies and speeds license payments, the government service notes in a release, with applicants enabled to pay for fishing permits from any location. “We are confident the new system will make it easier to access a tribal fishing permit that will allow anglers of all ages to fish within our beautiful freestone waters on the Qualla Boundary,” says Paula Price, a natural resources program coordinator for the EBCI, in a statement. The parties say users can buy permits online or in person using the PayIt Outdoors point-of-sale devices. A mobile-payments option is set for later in the year, the parties say.

PayIt took over the permit-payments processing for the EBCI last year when it acquired Sovereign Sportsman Solutions, which had installed the EBCI’s first online licensing service in 2014, PayIt says. The new service announced this week replaces the 10-year-old original.

The market PayIt is developing represents “a confluence of trends,” notes Don Apgar, director of merchant payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Consumers are used to paying for things on the fly, and state DNRs are realizing you can sell a lot more permits if you make it easier to buy them, and with a lot less labor.” At the same time, he adds, such technology makes it quicker and more convenient for outdoors enthusiasts to buy permits when they’re caught without them because “I didn’t know I needed one.”

Such so-called govtech markets also represent high potential for independent sales organizations and tech firms like PayIt, Apgar says. “From a payments perspective, it’s just another market where ISOs are finding success,” he notes, while markets like restaurants remain hotly contested among multiple payments providers.

Indeed, while recreational licenses may seem a restricted market, it can be profitable for resellers and tech firms, Apgar argues, as so far it has been largely neglected by resellers. “There’s a lot of money in that market. It’s a real targeted and vertical market,” he adds, noting that ISOs are increasingly attracted by “granular” markets for digital payments.

“This has been a growing market for some time, with plenty of merchant opportunities available,” agrees Cliff Gray, principal at Gray Consulting Ventures LLC. Still, he says by email, the market is “tricky.” “Digital licensing presents a number of technical and operational challenges,” he says, “particularly the intermittent nature of license sales. Hunting [and] fishing seasons, and auctions/lotteries/draws that result in huge volume spikes, all of which make the acquiring banks nervous.”

The difficulties don’t end there. “The biggest hurdle has been technical integration with the disparate, largely obsolete government platforms that products like PayIt must integrate with,” Gray says. He adds a hopeful note: “As they continue to enable these channels with technology,  the available market opportunities will expand.”

The EBCI deal is the latest installation announced by PayIt, which also maintains offices in Nashville, Tenn., and Toronto. In April, the company widened its relationship with the Ohio Division of Wildlife by providing a digital-licensing system there for both fishermen and hunters. The Ohio bureau has been a PayIt client since 2020. Before Ohio, the company had won recent contracts with Minnesota, Mississippi, and Missouri. It had also made system upgrades for the Arkansas Fame and Fish Commission.