Digital

  • Designing with purpose and empathy

    15th January 2025 by

    Guest blog post from Emma Jones, Content Design Lead, Social Security Scotland. Good content design is about making the user experience simple.  We need to design to help people do what they need to do, and no more. We need to focus on the purpose. Finding (and sticking to) the true purpose can be hard…

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  • ScotPayments – Building our own in-house technical capabilities

    9th January 2025 by

    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…

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  • Beyond ‘what is’

    8th January 2025 by

    Guest blog post from Josie Vallely, Senior Service Designer, Social Security Scotland. What will our new service design team look like? Like the medieval bestiary artists who were asked to paint creatures they had never seen in real life, we don’t know exactly what it will be, so we have the freedom of imagination to…

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  • Building confidence in content design

    18th December 2024 by

    Guest blog from Claire Robertson, Senior Content Designer, Social Security Scotland. Over the next few months, Social Security Scotland will be sharing a series of blogs from our User Centred Design team. We’ll give an insight into our ways of working and share some examples of our collaborative, user-centred approach. At Social Security Scotland, working…

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  • ScotPayments – Confirmation of Payee has launched

    28th March 2024 by

    Blog by Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager, ScotPayments. In our last blog, we shared a progress update for ScotPayments, a new payments service being designed and built by the Digital Directorate. Since then, we have gone live with our new feature Confirmation of Payee. Confirmation of Payee helps users verify that they are sending…

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  • ScotPayments – £13.5 million milestone reached

    18th December 2023 by

    Since launching the minimal viable service in June 2022, we’ve continued to take an agile approach to the development of the platform and adoption of payments, starting small and allowing the service to scale over time. As of December 2023, ScotPayments has now processed over 6000 payments to the value of £13.5 million which will increase at pace as we continue to scale our platform.

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  • SG Payments Service – Two million pounds milestone reached

    14th December 2022 by

    Blog by Ben Mills, Service Designer, SG Payments Team, Civil Service Fast stream. It has been several months since we last posted an update, and a lot has happened. The Scottish Government Payments Service officially moved into Private Beta in June 2022 when we launched our Minimum Viable Service, working with our first early adopter…

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  • SG payments service – Launch of private beta

    27th June 2022 by

    Blog by Lesley Allen, Service Owner, and Fiona Maclellan, Senior Service Designer, for the SG Payments Service. On 22 June, the Scottish Government Payments Service officially moved into private beta. Independent Living Fund Scotland, our beta partner, cut the ribbon and successfully made the first of many weekly Bacs payments to Transition Fund recipients. We’re…

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  • Making our first payments using the Payments Service

    17th January 2022 by

    Blog by Alasdair Murray, Business Analyst, Cloud And Digital Services Division. On Wednesday 8th December, the SG Payments Service, which is operated by the Scottish Government’s, Digital Directorate, successfully processed its first payroll run for Independent Living Fund Scotland (ILF Scotland). While it’s a cause for celebration, we know that it’s only the tip of…

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  • From tiny acorns: delivering a new payments service

    7th December 2021 by

    Hugh Wallace, Service Owner, Digital Directorate, talks about the build up to a significant milestone for Scottish Government’s payments service. It feels like a timely moment to be writing about Scottish Government’s payments service. It was almost three years ago to the day when a small team – just four of us at the time…

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