UK Government to look into offering Open Banking through GOV.UK Pay

The UK Government will begin looking into how GOV.UK Pay might offer Open Banking later this year, as part of ongoing development and delivery of digital services.

GOV.UK Pay already offers Apple Pay and Google Pay to central government digital services and recently launched a new ‘Recurring Card Payments’ function, initially with Kent County Council but which will be rolled out to other public services.

It enables local residents to save their payment details for use in ongoing regular payments.

Amanda Dahl, deputy director of digital service platforms at the Government Digital Service, revealed that it will soon be releasing the same mobile wallet payment types to local authority services, adding that “this will be a great benefit to people who are paying for government services on the go”.

In a blog post, ‘How common platforms deliver brilliant digital services’, Dahl wrote: “Later this year we’ll also be investigating how GOV.UK Pay might offer Open Banking, which means that people will have the option to pay for services conveniently using their own banking app.”

HMRC already uses Open Banking technology to collect self-assessment tax payments.

In 2021, HMRC deployed Ecospend’s ‘Pay by Bank’ technology to facilitate tax payments, marking the first time that an Open Banking payment method had been embedded within a government department’s systems.

In her blog post, Dahl also revealed that GOV.UK Notify is due to launch the ability to add attachments and QR codes to letters, which she said will enable more government services to use the product to communicate to citizens.

“With all digital products, it’s important to continue developing them based on user needs, even when they are well established like GOV.UK Pay, GOV.UK Notify or GOV.UK Design System,” she added.