The Scottish Government has taken steps to develop a common payments service for the country’s public sector.
Its project team has gone through discovery and alpha phases and is now looking for support in the beta phase of development.
It has published a prior information notice for the Scottish Government Payments Transformation, saying it is ready to provide more details to potential suppliers on features such as the expected architecture, known constraints, user research and requirements for the beta and live service.
The plan derives from a widespread duplication of effort and investment across the Scottish public sector in developing ways of taking payments.
Financial systems interface
The notice indicates that the first stage will involve creating an outbound payments service, with a transactional history, that can interface with public authorities’ financial systems. It will consider inbound payments in the longer term.
It also specifies a need to make any solution secure, scalable and built using component based technology.
The plan first became public in late 2018. The team has acknowledged the availability of GOV.UK Pay, developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS), as free-to-use payments platform for the public sector, but said it wants to extend the capability to cover inbound and outbound payments.
Image by Howard Lake, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
