How we helped a local authority replace their payment provider in just three days
About North Tyneside Council
Based in the northeast, responsible for more than 200,000 residents, and with more than 3,000 staff – North Tyneside Council is a complex, growing local authority with evolving needs.
Processing around £1.5m worth of payments per annum – spread across payroll, creditors, and the collection of tax and rents – the council oversees a diverse service portfolio delivering to a diverse customer base.
And with local authorities under more pressure than ever, making sure that payments arrive on time is crucial to keeping the council funded.
The Challenge
Facing the end of their contract with a legacy system, and unable to come to an agreement that protected the interests of the council and its customers, North Tyneside Council turned to the market to solve their problems.
Helen Goulding, one of the council’s longest serving employees working in the Digital Services Team, told us about the problems they needed to solve:
The contract for our BACS supplier was held by a private partnership and, when repeated warnings about the approaching expiration were ignored and the partnership didn’t communicate with the legacy provider, we couldn’t face the risk to our essential services. We also knew we needed to modernise, add new functions, and find a partnership wherein we had better communication.
Automation was a major requirement for Helen – as the efficiencies and costs saved would become available to reinvest into services for its constituents. But the council also required robust security, compliance with ISO 27001, GDPR, and a platform that was on the BACS approved software list.
When you add all those requirements together – as well as some complexities around HSM Certificates and Faster Payments that needed to continue to be supported – there really weren’t many suppliers that could tick all our boxes. AccessPay was one of them and really stood out because of the excellent communication we had from the outset.
The Solution
After speaking to other suppliers and navigating the public sector procurement process, Helen and North Tyneside Council chose AccessPay to be their new payments platform:
What sealed the deal for us with AccessPay was meeting who would be our project manager, who was absolutely fantastic and walked us through the entire process. It gave us a huge amount of confidence.
Adopting AccessPay for its BACS and direct debits , whilst also supporting the incumbent HSM and SFTP setup, gave the council a much more streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective payments platform:
We’ve noticed a difference in how people make payments – they’re engaging way more in self-service digital methods. We want to ensure that all our systems are capable of handling current preferences and trends, but also able to cope with anything that comes up in the future. All the efficiencies we make, the customer sees the benefit too.
Manual processes don’t add any value to the end goal. We’re really looking to remove those as much as possible – they’re not adding anything for the customer, they’re not adding anything for the staff. Some are essential to the process, but we’re keeping them to an absolute minimum. We know we have the tools in AccessPay to do this, so where it’s appropriate then without a shadow of a doubt we will automate it.
But the crowning glory of this project was its record implementation speed, a joint victory made possible by AccessPay’s technical expertise and Helen’s experience and proactivity:
We were initially quite concerned that we were trying to do this in a very short space of time. I still can’t believe that we got live in that time, three days between our legacy system closing and taking our first payment was just phenomenal.
By applying for HSM certificates ahead of time, organising the SFTP, and recording all users, roles, and file formats – Helen was able to present our implementation team with everything they needed as soon as the contract was signed. 72 hours later, the system was live and accepting payments.
The Results
As a local authority, one of the main responsibilities is making sure that those who need help from public services are catered for:
The digital-first, automation-first nature of AccessPay means we can give anyone the ability to self-serve. But not everybody can. By implementing these services for most, it frees up our time to assist vulnerable people and those who can’t access that journey – we can focus our resources where they’re most needed and best used.
This time saved also has a very real monetary value too:
The fewer manual processes we have, the lower our costs, and the more funds we can allocate to critical services for our residents. Plus, the fiscal efficiencies are outstanding. We’ve gone from paying 50p on a cash payment to 0.02p for a direct debit – which again is money saved that can go to serving people in North Tyneside with what they need most.
With a smooth transition, rapid implementation, better efficiencies, and improved control over its payment operations – AccessPay has helped the council to quickly and effectively revolutionise the way it takes and processes payments.