One payment by product manager precedes roll out for range of services in the autumn
The Government Digital Service (GDS) has said its GOV.UK Pay payments processing service has just made its first ever live transaction and is now “ready for business”.
The first live payment was made yesterday on GOV.UK Pay’s product manager Till Wirth's credit card in front of the GDS senior team and the newly appointed director general of the service, Kevin Cunnington.
Next step, said the team, will be the roll out of more online services from the autumn.
The news marks more solid progress for the system, which is designed to be a secure cross-government platform for online payments for all parts of the public sector to use.
In August, UKAuthority recorded that the system had met an important compliance target by being declared up to scratch with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard as service provider level 1, approving it for processing credit and debit card payments on behalf of public sector organisations.
But Pay will not take off, GDS has acknowledged, until it is seen as a completely secure way of making credit or debit card payments online.
The cloud delivered service is one of the main flagship projects in the Government as a Platform push driven by GDS, along with GOV.UK Verify for identity assurance and GOV.UK Notify for notifications on services.
These are all meant to be highly useful online services that can be taken up by public authorities for their own needs.
Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
