The Government Digital Service (GDS) has indicated that it looking to provide an open banking function in the GOV.UK platform.
It is part of a wider programme of adding new functions to the common platform it provides for government organisations, outlined in a blogpost by the deputy director of digital services platform, Amanda Dahl.
She said that later this year GDS will investigate how Pay might offer open banking – which allows for financial data to be shared between banks and third party service providers through APIs – to give people the option to pay for services using their own banking app.
It is also planning to make it possible to pay for local authority services through the Apple Pay and Google Pay digital wallets, as is already possible for central government services.
This comes soon after it added a new function to Pay to enable it to take repeated payments.
Common solutions
Dahl pointed to the plans as part of the product development process for the common platforms, aimed at creating solutions in response to the needs of service users.
It also involves a change to the GOV.UK Notify platform making it possible to add attachments and QR codes to letters, which should enable more government services to use the product to communicate with people. It is an element of plans revealed earlier this year to provide more flexibility to the service.
In addition, GDS has taken its new GOV.UK Forms product to the private beta stage, working with services such as the Department for Work and Pensions’ Access to Work Plus referral.
“Ultimately,” Dahl said, “we want to be the first choice for building government digital services and it’s my vision for the future that any team in government, regardless of their technical skills, can deliver usable, accessible digital services that integrate seamlessly with GOV.UK, so our new mission is to integrate our products to enable that to happen.”
