Digital

ScotPayments – Building our own in-house technical capabilities

January 9, 2025 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Digital Scotland, ScotPayments

Blog by Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager in ScotPayments, sharing an update on progress and how the team have been working on their own internal transformation by building in-house technical capabilities.

Here at ScotPayments we focus a lot on how we are supporting the digital transformation of public services in Scotland. By thinking about payments as a platform we are:

• Building something centrally that is easy for service teams to plug in to and re-use, without additional procurement. That saves them time, money and hassle.
• Building a single platform also means we can establish standards that will work across government. That will cut down on bureaucracy and needless repetition of work.
• Finally, a platform will make things better for public servants and for the people of Scotland. It will be quicker for us to set up new services or retire old ones. When new payment technologies emerge, we’ll be able to securely add them to the platform once, for the benefit of everyone.

If you’d like to hear more about ScotPayments or how we got to this point, see our other blogs here SG Payments Archives and ScotPayments Archives.

A quick update on progress

Before we talk about building our own in-house technical and engineering capability, here is an update on progress since our last blog post.

We are currently in our Private Beta phase of delivery and are starting to realise several of the benefits mentioned above. As of this week, we have made over £78 million of payments our platform on behalf of our Beta partner Independent Living Fund Scotland. Our focus more recently has been on the preparation of onboarding a new Beta partner who will make their first live payments in January 2025.

Since its launch in December 2023, we have seen some considerable benefits with our Confirmation of Payee feature. Confirmation of Payee is a name and bank detail checking service which helps prevent UK domestic payments from being sent to the wrong account. It requires the payer to confirm the name and bank details of the payee before making a payment, ensuring that funds are being sent to the correct recipient. This helps to reduce the risk of fraud and error in payments transactions as it performs a real time check with the bank of the account holder, verifying that the account exists and the account name and bank details provided are correct. Since its launch, an average of 10% of all Confirmation of Payee checks have returned a “no match” result. This has allowed staff users to investigate and rectify the payee information before submitting payment, creating operational efficiencies and ensuring the payment goes to the recipient correctly the first time.

Developing our own in-house technical capabilities

What we haven’t spoken about much is our own internal transformation we’ve had to undertake as a team. One major change in our operating model we’ve been working on behind the scenes, and as part of a Directorate wide approach is moving away from outsourcing our software development to third parties and building our own in-house technical and engineering capability. While this may sound like a small change, here is why building our own internal team is having a huge impact:

1. Greater control over quality and responsiveness

While third party suppliers bring valuable expertise and resources, by developing our own in-house team, we have more direct control over the payment platform we are building. ScotPayments has been designed and built for government which means the platform has bespoke needs and requires us to adapt to change at short notice. By having our own team on hand, we can be as responsive as possible while understanding the specific environment we are working in.

2. Long term cost savings

Building our own in-house technical teams will lead to long term financial benefits and allows teams to support multiple components and platforms.

3. Building and retaining internal knowledge and skills

Another benefit lies in knowledge retention. One main challenge with relying on suppliers is that in-depth technical knowledge about the software resides outside of the organisation. By hiring our own teams, we are building and retaining critical knowledge and reducing the risk of losing critical knowledge when external vendor contracts come to an end.

4. Better security and data privacy

While our vendors have strong safeguards in place, working with external suppliers naturally introduces greater risk for security and privacy. In-house technical teams allow us to keep tighter controls over access to sensitive data and systems. The team can oversee every step of the development process and ensure security protocols are enforced. This reduces risk of breaches and strengthens overall integrity of digital infrastructure.

Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer, shared his thoughts on the new way of working: “Having software engineers working in house improves communication and the understanding of the technology being built. The feedback about the new team members has been brilliant. This is part of growing the Digital Directorate’s capability to build and run reusable components that power services across the public sector in Scotland.” 

How are we doing this?

After extensive recruitment earlier last year, we now have a team of fantastic software engineers who are working closely with our suppliers undertaking a comprehensive handover process. The team are using a method called ensemble programming which is a collaborative approach where the entire team work together on a single problem, leveraging collective expertise to tackle challenges and develop solutions in real-time.

Adam Barclay, Software Engineer Manager, shared his thoughts: “Ensemble programming allows all members of the team to contribute to a piece of code. We find that more ideas are generated and discussed which leads to better solutions, and with everyone looking at what is being typed, any errors are caught immediately leading to much higher code quality.” 

What next?

The ScotPayments engineering team have now taken on full control of the release process, built a common adaptor for partner organisations and pushed forward with the scaling and resilience of the platform as we work towards onboarding new partners and moving to Private Beta.

To find out more, please visit https://gov.scot/scotpayments or contact ScotPayments@gov.scot.

Tags: digital public services, digital sector, digital transformation, platforms, ScotPayments

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