On 2 June, the Government Digital Service announced that Adyen would take over from Stripe as the payment provider behind GOV.UK Pay, covering local authorities, police forces, the armed forces and the rest of the non-Crown public sector. Around 1,000 services are moving across.
GOV.UK Pay has handled over £9 billion across more than 135 million transactions in its near-decade of operation. Swapping out the supplier underneath all of that, without anyone at either end noticing, is an impressive piece of engineering. The Register puts the new contract at up to £25.3 million over three years.
The critical line in the GDS announcement was almost an aside: there will be no discernible difference for the person paying, and no loss of functionality. A resident pays for a blue badge in July. Somewhere behind the screen, a request that used to travel through Stripe now travels through Adyen. They notice nothing. Their council notices nothing.
We said recently that there’s no painless route to change
We did, and we meant it. The making changes like this invisible takes good design and architecture. The pain doesn’t disappear, but it is contained within the parts of the system that have to change. The person on the receiving end is still handed something that works. That is what GDS is doing here: the unglamorous migration, so that a thousand teams don’t each have to do it themselves.
Which is exactly why we build the way we do
When SurveyOptic works with GOV.UK Pay, rather than to whichever company happens to be processing the payments that month. So this month’s switch from Stripe to Adyen is GDS’s job to deliver, and ours to make invisible. For the public bodies running services through us, it is a non-event. Nothing to reconfigure or test. Nothing, really, to notice.
The same logic runs through GOV.UK Notify
It is the approach behind our GOV.UK Notify integration too. When a SurveyOptic invitation or reminder goes out through Notify, it travels on the government’s own messaging platform. That is the one public bodies already use for email, text and letters, and the one the public already recognise. That seamless delivery and consistent appearance makes a real difference. A survey or consultation invitation that arrives through a trusted government channel gets opened; one from an unfamiliar sender gets left unread.
See how it fits
We’ve gathered the government integrations that SurveyOptic supports (GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify among them) onto a single page, so you can see them at a glance. You’ll find it at surveyoptic.com/govuk.
If you’d like to talk through what the GOV.UK Pay migration means for something you’re running, do get in touch. Although the most likely answer, happily, is the one GDS led with: nothing you need to worry about – it is taken care of.