Hackney has signed with allpay through the Procurement for Housing (PFH) Framework – allowing it to continue offering citizens access to both PayPoint and Post Office outlets and branches for the payment of councils bills and saving approximately £20,000 over the course of the contract.
allpay – which already supplies payment solutions to 15 London Boroughs – re-routed both Issuer Identification Numbers (IIN) belonging to the council from its previous supplier, the Co-operative Bank (19-digit and 23-digit payment reference numbers) ensuring citizens could continue to use the existing barcodes and payment cards issued by the council.
As part of the implementation, allpay tested existing barcode and mag stripe stationery, supplied the council with a file format it could integrate into its Northgate system and concatenated the transaction file delivery, ensuring the council only receives two transaction files for each IIN.
The council went live with allpay on 1st May and since then, allpay has processed 21,000 transactions with a value of £1.5m. In total, allpay has set up 13 schemes on its internal systems, allowing the council to identify between a range of different fund types including housing rents, council tax, housing benefit overpayments and street-trader payments.
Chris Ellmore, Head of Treasury and Banking at London Borough of Hackney, said:
"The implementation with allpay went very smoothly. We benefited from reduced transaction fees and banking fees that we had from our previous supplier. As allpay also transfers cleared funds directly into our bank account, we no longer have to sweep funds from our previous supplier’s account into our main account. By the end of the year, we are also looking at utilising allpay’s stationery services, meaning both services will be under a single contract, whereas they were with two different suppliers before."