Digital

Strengthening the Foundations of ScotPayments

July 27, 2026 by deborahamzil No Comments | Category Digital Strategy for Scotland, Public Service Reform Strategy, ScotPayments, Scottish Government

Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager in the Scottish Government’s ScotPayments team shares an update on ScotPayments progress. 

As Scotland’s common payments platform, ScotPayments helps public sector organisations make payments that people depend on every day. Behind every payment is an expectation that services are reliable, secure and available when needed.

In a previous blog, we shared how ScotPayments was building its in-house engineering capability and investing in the skills needed to support Scotland’s common payments platform for the long term. Those foundations have enabled us to deliver one of the most significant technical milestones in the programme’s history: the successful launch of ScotPayments 2.0.

We are pleased to share what has been achieved and recognise the collective effort that made it possible.

ScotPayments at Scale

Since its launch, ScotPayments has continued to grow in both capability and reach. The service now supports multiple public sector organisations and has processed more than £5 billion in payments across a range of services, including pensions, grants and other business-critical payments.

As ScotPayments has grown, the technologies available to support a platform of this scale have also evolved. When ScotPayments was first designed, cloud technologies were at a different stage of maturity. Advances in cloud-native services, automation and platform management now provide more effective ways to build and operate large-scale payment services.

ScotPayments 2.0 takes advantage of these developments, enabling the service to evolve more rapidly while maintaining the resilience and reliability expected of a critical national service. It also strengthens our ability to onboard new organisations and support increasing payment volumes and values as adoption continues to grow.

Building a More Resilient Platform

Over the past year, the team has delivered a range of improvements to strengthen the service and support future adoption. ScotPayments 2.0 is better able to recover from disruption, handle increasing demand and support the reliable delivery of essential payments. The platform also benefits from modern deployment practices, allowing updates to be introduced without interrupting users or payment operations.

Delivering this transformation required the migration of live payment services and operational data to a modernised environment while continuing to enable organisations to make business-critical payments. Careful planning, testing and collaboration ensured the migration was completed successfully, with no unplanned downtime and no failed payments during the transition.

The new platform makes greater use of managed cloud services and automation, reducing the need to manage underlying infrastructure and allowing teams to focus on continuous service improvement. It has also been designed to simplify the onboarding of new organisations, improve file-processing performance and provide the flexibility to support future payment methods as business needs continue to evolve.

Adam Barclay, Software Engineering Manager, said:

“ScotPayments 2.0 is resilient, secure, and can be deployed with no downtime, meaning customers are not affected by new releases. We have reduced the time taken to process hundreds of thousands of payments from several hours to a couple of minutes, we can automatically scale to process any number of simultaneous payments, and we have reduced our cloud computing costs by 85%. These improvements validate our strategy to build an in-house engineering team, and offer tangible benefits to our customers and to the Scottish Government.”

Delivering ScotPayments 2.0 Together

While much of this work is invisible to end users, the successful transition to ScotPayments 2.0 was only possible through collaboration across a wide range of teams within the Scottish Government and partner organisations.

The transition involved far more than a platform upgrade. It included the migration of live operational data, the transition to a cloud-native architecture, extensive testing and assurance activities, security reviews, operational readiness planning and coordination with external suppliers and service providers.

For many involved, months of planning culminated in a carefully orchestrated migration effort that brought together engineering, cloud operations, service management, security, architecture, testing and delivery teams.

We would like to recognise the contribution made by colleagues across Cloud Platform Services, Information Technology Services, the Cyber Security Unit and the Security Operations Centre, as well as architecture, security, delivery and operational teams, alongside our suppliers and partners. Their expertise, commitment and willingness to work across organisational boundaries helped establish the infrastructure, connectivity, monitoring, security controls and operational processes needed to support a resilient live service.

We would also like to thank our partners, Independent Living Fund Scotland (ILF Scotland) and the Scottish Public Pensions Agency (SPPA). Their teams worked alongside us throughout planning, testing and go-live activities, helping validate the new platform and giving us the confidence to transition live services to ScotPayments 2.0 successfully.

Lesley Allen, Service Owner, ScotPayments said:

“The successful launch of ScotPayments 2.0 is a significant achievement for the programme, and reflects the dedication, strong collaboration, in-house technical expertise and a shared commitment across teams. By investing in the platform’s foundations, we’ve strengthened our ability to support critical public services today while preparing for future growth and innovation.”

Looking Ahead

More than a platform upgrade, ScotPayments 2.0 represents a significant step forward in how the Scottish Government designs, builds and operates digital services. Built as a fully cloud-native service and supported through in-house capability, it provides a blueprint for delivering resilient, scalable and sustainable public sector technology.

ScotPayments will continue to evolve as the needs of public services change, supporting more organisations and enabling new capabilities over time. By investing in strong technical foundations today, we are ensuring Scotland’s common payments platform is ready to meet the needs of public services tomorrow, securely, reliably and at scale.

If you would like to find out more, or are interested in onboarding to the ScotPayments platform, please contact ScotPayments@gov.scot.

Tags: cloud services, Collaboration, Independent Living Fund, ScotPayments, Scotpayments 2.0, Scottish Public Pensions Agency (SPPA)

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