Amnesty International Secretariat process BACS payments digitally

Amnesty International is a charitable organisation with more than 7m supporters worldwide. Headquartered in London, their focus is to protect human rights by campaigning for justice and dignity.

The non-government organisation carries out vital work, from campaigning against the unfair treatment of care home patients during Covid-19 to the Windrush scandal and challenging racial injustice. Their transformative work has received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Why Amnesty International chose AccessPay?

Amnesty International make hundreds of UK payroll, supplier, employee and cash advances payments each month. These 500 Direct Credits are made via BACS across several runs. In 2019 the charity reviewed their incumbent provider after being told of an expensive upgrade. After a short tender process, they moved to AccessPay, a cloud-based payment platform and saved ‘hours of manual work’ on each run.

More efficient, secure and user-friendly

By integrating SunSystems, the charity’s back office system, with BACS it has made payment runs faster and added extra security measures such as PGP encryption to Amnesty International processes.

Automating file uploads through AccessPay is much more efficient and removes the risk of manual intervention or error when a file passes over users’ desktops. Pascale added:

“Our key users have reported that the platform is very user-friendly and easy to operate. They are able to see a much better overview of each transaction.”

Due to Amnesty International high-profile work that can be highly sensitive they opted for Secure File Transfer Protocol (sFTP) to transfer the payment data.

Although this method is extremely secure, they also opted for PGP Encryption on our recommendation, to ensure that all data at rest could not be viewed or utilised without being decrypted by AccessPay. This provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for payment files.

Charity experts with attentive customer service

Craig Watson, senior sales executive at AccessPay explains:

“Amnesty International had a unique set of requirements due to the nature of the life-changing work that they do. “This made them more cautious of their payment processes and the security around this, AccessPay were well positioned to support with end-to-end encryption to ensure optimum security at all times.”

Amnesty International Secretariat described the relationship with AccessPay’s implementation team as ‘patient, proactive and flexible.’