Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/06/04/govuk-goes-dutch-on-payments-as-it-dumps-stripe/5250763

by toomuchtodo • 2 months ago

590 235 2 months ago

theregister.com

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...

https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk

toomuchtodo8• 2 months ago

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/02/building-for-the-future-m...

https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/182de6c9-d...

https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/roadmap/

https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/performance/

arjie2• 2 months ago

Surprisingly small contract. It's interesting to see that a full government contract for a payment provider is a fraction of a US mid-size company's cloud bill. I am constantly surprised by things like this. Here's another: there are more foreigners in Taiwan (total pop. 25 m) than in China (total pop. 1.4 b).

toomuchtodo8• 2 months ago

Brazil's central bank operates their instant payment network Pix [1] [2] [3] for ~$10M/year [4]. Its not that these are small contracts, but that large, inefficient, unnecessary contracts have become the norm (I argue). Similar example from India's UPI payment system [5]. The US has FedNow to move instant payments for pennies, but banking and payment system participants in the US ecosystem are avoiding it to continue to private payment system rake [6] (cc networks, Zelle commercial bank network, private wallets, etc).

The evidence is clear you don't need to skim 3% off of an economy to provide instant payment capabilities. The enterprise value of US payment companies is a function of how long they hold onto this volume for, when competition is ramping up. You're just pushing ISO 20022 XML messages around a bus.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)

[2] https://frontierfintech.substack.com/p/55-send-pix-brazils-i...

[3] https://brazilstockguide.com/behind-the-lines/the-cost-of-pi...

This makes the American dispute more sophisticated than it may first appear. Pix certainly puts pressure on private payment models, card networks and acquirers. It also reduces friction for consumers, small businesses and person-to-person transfers. But its deeper effect is institutional. It turns the bank deposit into an even more efficient payment instrument — and, by doing so, changes the role of banks in liquidity intermediation.
There is an irony here. For decades, the United States built the narrative of private financial innovation. Brazil, through a public, interoperable and massively adopted system, produced one of the world’s most efficient payment infrastructures. The study notes how unusual Pix adoption was: more than 150 million users in its first year, use by nine out of ten small businesses, and daily volumes capable of reaching about 1% of annual GDP on a single peak day.
The reading should not be triumphalist. Pix is a powerful innovation, but it is not cost-free for the financial system. It improves the user experience, reduces transaction costs and increases competition in payments. At the same time, it requires banks to hold more liquidity and may reduce the transformation of deposits into credit. For the United States, Pix appears as a digital-trade issue. For Brazil, it is a question of financial sovereignty. For banks, it is a question of liquidity. Pix began as a button inside an app. It became a piece of financial policy — and now, of geopolitics.

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44753626

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

actapp802• 2 months ago

don't centralized payment systems like this reduce the overall resilience of the ecosystem and prevent future innovation? You hint on those lines with the possible future transformation of deposits into credit.

Why doesn't the US private ecosystem manage to lower costs similarly? (Zelle comes to mind). It is interesting that this has happened in more highly regulated countries where the free market likely could not have come up with a cheaper solution on their own due to the same overbearing system that effectively forces adoption of this centralized solution.

jorvi3• 2 months ago

Feels odd that you exclude mentioning the EU, which has had instant transfers for more than a decade. More than two decades, if you include things like iDeal from The Netherlands.

kyrra• 2 months ago

The BCB in Brazil does very little to operate Pix. It's effectively a P2P system, where the BCB forces all the banks to interop with one-another (and all the banks directly call eachother). They can operate it that cheaply because they do close to nothing technically (they host the main discovery endopints). The only place the BCB actually ingests data is via their reporting mechanisms.

UPI is a bit more centralized, where the NPCI does the top-level routing between banks, so their operating budget is likely much higher than Pix. It also is drastically more simple to be a participant in UPI compared to Pix.

For Pix adoption: you can thank Covid for that. The Brazilian government said if you wanted to get free money from the government, you had to set up and use Pix.

US Financial Innovation: I'd say the hard thing here is that the government is extremely strict (lots of regulation) when you start looking like a bank. Lots of companies have tried to innovate here, but regulation makes it really hard to do. There's a lot of regulator capture going on.

testfrequency2• 2 months ago

Why bring up Taiwan and China? This feels incredibly cherry picked?

If you know Taiwan’s history, and you understand China - there’s no surprise to be..

arjie2• 2 months ago

Well, obviously it’s cherry-picked. It’s an example of something that challenges my intuition. Most things align with my intuition because I’m in my late 30s and have seen enough of the world to have a fairly good idea of the rough numbers. Here’s another one: the London Underground is older than the telephone.

There’s a light board game called Timeline where you have stuff like this and there are so many surprises. Temporal stuff is hard to reason about and the game catches that. But with large numbers one loses intuition easily: NYC’s subway vs. all domestic and international US air travel is closer in total passengers than one would think. The median American did not fly last year.

Stuff like this. It’s just Gladwell-fodder but numerically fun.

chrncirurp• 2 months ago

Why bring up Taiwan and China? This feels incredibly cherry picked?

It’s because many times the obvious intuition is incorrect

He could’ve compared Singapore and China too

colechristensen5• 2 months ago

Payment processing costs are a scam. They're 10x as expensive as they need to be to fund rewards programs and fund the financial system.

EU max credit card transaction fees are 0.3%, in the US they can be up to 4%.

It just doesn't cost 4% of a transaction to handle the exchange of funds. Just wealth transfer to finance people and the upper class who take advantage of credit card perks.

fragmede2• 2 months ago

Except in the US, it does. Depending on the card, it can cost as much as 4.5% (or more!) to run the card. You can argue that it shouldn't, but that's a different statement than it doesn't.

switz• 2 months ago

Can someone explain to me if EU card transactions are capped, why Stripe charges me (US) the full ride on my EU customer's cards? In fact, I get charged even more for EU cards – perhaps as much as 2.5% extra.

I just checked and I get charged ~8% in fees on a 10 euro transaction on Stripe. Of course some of that is the low transaction amount (flat 0.30), but it's brutal for a small business like myself.

    2.9% + 1.5% (intl card) + 1% (currency conversion) + 0.30

    Payment amount (€1.00 EUR = $1.15253 USD)
 
    €10.00 EUR -> $11.53 USD

    Fees

    Total:    - $0.93 USD

    Stripe currency conversion fee 
    - $0.12 USD

    Stripe processing fees
    - $0.81 USD

    Net amount
    $10.60 USD

I guess the NA interchange is charging the card, rather than the EU? Could using a MOR reduce the fee structure?

enos_feedler3• 2 months ago

As someone who really enjoys rewards programs, keep those scams alive!

PearlRiver• 2 months ago

The only good use case for a credit card is if you are buying something from someone you do not trust. I have a CC and it use it a few times a year. But using them to pay for groceries or ordering something from Amazon is just moronic.

The way I see it: you are either rich and don't care or you are poor and need to spend money that is not in your account (no judging I grew up poor and had to hide from debt collectors when I was a kid).

trumpdong9• 2 months ago

The funny thing about that is that HN used to say if the fee was 4% it's because that's what it costs and if it was any lower the card networks would just abandon the country that forced it to be lower, since they'd lose money.

matt-p2• 2 months ago

Interchange average in the UK was about 0.2% last time I looked (which was a few years ago), it't not much anyway.

Also the government doesn't really do card transactions. I imagine this is for fairly rare things like renewing your passport, booking a driving test or buying a title copy. Oh and visa fees maybe? Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.

TreeInBuxton2• 2 months ago

Depends on the tax - I pay my vehicle tax through the gov.uk website!

martinald• 2 months ago

Why do you think that? People definitely pay taxes by card.

But regardless this contract is _not_ for HMRC payments, its for gov.uk pay which is basically a centralised service that other services can use.

bigfatkitten2• 2 months ago

Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.

I do. If I’m going to give the government a big pile of money, I may as well earn some points for my trouble.

nocorrect83• 2 months ago

Interchange as a standalone might be low but scheme fees are about the same nowadays. Aydens provide a detail breakdown per transaction, for example on a UK consumer credit card there's sometimes 8 different line items (interchange, ayden markup, various scheme fees), one generally does not get out under 0.5% on interchange++ even in the UK on the most favourable cards. When you're on interchange pricing with either Stripe, Adyen or another big boy you're paying extra for AVS, 3DS, and several other scheme services. No one is walking away with 0.2% all in. A lot of people find these Visa and Mastercard published PDFs for interchange and think that's cheap, but reality is when the schemes got their nuts tightened on interchange fees they just spread the loss by marking up various scheme services and mandating them. John still want's his Avios points even in Europe/UK.

The gov.uk runs card transactions for dozens of services - which add up - from car tax, driver license renewal, passport replacements, to paying previous NI years (do you consider this tax?) and so on..

CamouflagedKiwi2• 2 months ago

And Companies House - still relatively rare though, like one payment of £50 per company per year.

harvey9• 2 months ago

Road fund licence aka car tax is probably the most common thing that lots of people pay for regularly.

Magnets• 2 months ago

If £8m/year is a fraction of a mid-size company cloud budget, I don't think you can class them as "mid-size"

ExoticPearTree4• 2 months ago

Mid-size in the US is comparable to a large european company, so yeah... mid-size.

I'm with a rather small company (~ 250 people) in the US and we pay about $1,2mm-1,4mm yearly on GCP alone.

telesilla• 2 months ago

Stripe allows for these kinds of payments, we've been updating our store to support Wero etc. It should give better conversation and processing rates than the US credit cards.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Associated Adyen post: https://www.adyen.com/press-and-media/adyen-payments-gov-uk

oakinnagbe• 2 months ago

I'm curious whether this will materially reduce costs for local authorities or whether the benefits are primarily in expanding payment options.

siren2026• 2 months ago

I wish Adyen was as good at marketing and hype as Stripe was.

Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.

Oras• 2 months ago

Which part that makes them look bigger than they are? Which services are larger than stripe?

0x59• 2 months ago

Stripe has a useful tool and markets it well. With that said, I'm glad there are other options.

theturtletalks• 2 months ago

A big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion.

The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.

indymike• 2 months ago

Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.

bostik• 2 months ago

Like with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages.

From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?

ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.

fourseventy• 2 months ago

Stripes revenue is ~$20B seems pretty big to me...

randunel• 2 months ago

No point in marketing when you outright reject customers:

Thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback.

I have taken a look at the information you have provided and unfortunately, at this time, Adyen is only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year or businesses which are currently supported by a Plugin built by Adyen. The reason for this is so that we are able to provide the right level of support and resources to our merchants at the right stage of their company growth.

If you would like to stay up to date with our payment offering please do sign up to our newsletter here.

In the interim, I want to ensure that you find the right provider, so I would like to direct you about payments. They are specialists in finding the most relevant payment solutions for all business models and I have no doubt they will offer you several great options.

I wish you the best of luck with your business moving forward, and hopefully we can reconnect in the future.

Kind Regards,

Ana Sales Specialist

whatshisface• 2 months ago

What are these plugins? Could any business choose to use one, or are they highly specialized?

Calvin02• 2 months ago

At some point you realize that your smallest customers generate the least value but require the most support.

Shedding low value users to others makes you stronger and them weaker.

jeroenhd• 2 months ago

I wish more companies would try to serve tiny shops at the same time they serve multi million euro companies. The requirements for the two are very different, as is the support and customer care requirement. Integrating directly with Adyen as a small business is like running a kubernetes cluster on AWS to host your blog, except they'll have even less time for customer support to spend on your tickets when things don't go right.

Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.

Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.

notpushkin4• 2 months ago

There’s a huge difference for small business owners.

Stripe has a Get started button. You click it, fill out a form, get your site approved in maybe a day, and start making money.

Adyen has a Talk to our team button. You close the tab and never think about it again until you’re making serious money.

---

Edit: that is, of course, by design. Adyen doesn’t want small businesses. From the sibling comment:

only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year

rahkiin• 2 months ago

Adyen has resellers. Mollie is one example, they do have. Get Started and no lower limit. These smaller parties rely on the bank license of Adyen

trumpdong9• 2 months ago

Sadly pretty normal for European companies. The penalties they face for signing up a bad customer are so much harsher they won't risk letting just anyone sign up without actual KYC not just checkbox KYC. This is the same reason Hetzner turns away 50% of its customers.

sourcegrift• 2 months ago

Why don't they have a fax option so you absolutely never think about it again?

fastball• 2 months ago

Stripe processes like $2T in txns per year – how do they look bigger than that?

jbverschoor• 2 months ago

Adyen is used by Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Booking, etc

Stripe only outpaced after last year 34% vs 8% growth. Volume 1.9T vs 1.6T

aleqs• 2 months ago

Marketing is really Stripe's main competency and focus.

amelius• 2 months ago

Really? I thought Stripe was a company that sells CSS stylesheets.

ergocoder• 2 months ago

Adyen isn't self-serve, so it's difficult for common people to be hyped with it.

More importantly, Adyen doesn't have a messiah-like founder. Patrick is like the second coming of Jesus.

thomashabets22• 2 months ago

So maybe it'll stop taking three requests, 1-2 months, and a certified letter every year to receive your tax refund?

HMRCs digital services in general are pretty good, but refunds not so much.

hsbauauvhabzb• 2 months ago

Forcing people through all that means they collect more interest and I assume some people don’t bother.

MagicMoonlight• 2 months ago

My self assessment refund came through within days of submitting my assessment.

alibarber2• 2 months ago

Yes I have also received payments for refunds of PAYE automatically within a month or two of no action on my part.

tikkabhuna• 2 months ago

Yeah, this has been my experience too. I don't know how much easier it could be.

thomashabets22• 2 months ago

2-3 years ago they changed something and I know tens of people (and I don't know that many people) say that now filling in bank details in the SA itself has become a no-op, and that they (and I) now had to explicitly request a withdrawal of the balance. Often 2-3 times.

And it's not been a matter of waiting. The money just sits there for the better part of a year before people have noticed.

m1015• 2 months ago

The solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs. Then everyone will start using bank transfers.

Silhouette3• 2 months ago

That would seem like a logical solution. So wouldn't it be convenient for the expensive payment methods if legalities prevented merchants from charging higher fees to customers using them?

m1015• 2 months ago

That’s exactly the system the card companies try to impose on vendors (mostly successfully).

In the UK it’s the system the law imposes on everyone.

johannes12343212• 2 months ago

The issue with bank transfers today is that the SEPA system is robust and established, but got no web compatible API.

But there are two projects (why one, if you can have two!?), one being Wero by different banks, the other being the Digital Euro by the European central bank. If either finds good adaption (Wero is rolling out slowly and for quite a bunch of banks every customer already got a Wero account automatically) this could move things around ...

TRiG_Ireland2• 2 months ago

I'm Irish, but I've built a website for an Australian client and they integrated something which did that. In the checkout, you could choose to pay with a system which would log you into your bank's website, where you could approve a payment, then return to the site on which you'd made your purchase, where it would instantly be marked as paid. I think that it may have taken a few days for the money to actually arrive in their bank account, but the payment was authorised instantly.

trumpdong9• 2 months ago

I believe the usual SEPA flow is either scan this QR code or type this IBAN+reference into your bank's mobile app? SEPA is a "giro" system, meaning the person who owns the money has to push it, rather than a cheque system where the money owner writes something to the merchant who then pulls money from the money owner. These are always less convenient because the money owner has to contact their bank. They're also more secure.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 months ago

solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs

Then I offer an all-in price and take your customers.

m1015• 2 months ago

Except your prices would have to be higher. Costco works on <0.5% margin, whilst these card fees are 1,2,3%+

m463• 2 months ago

The solution to all these expenses is to just have the user pay the transaction costs.

so the ticketmaster model?

m1015• 2 months ago

Ticketmaster is a monopoly.

Customers paying the price would: 1) induce scrutiny from the public on visa a Mastercard (the monopolies) 2) encourage the competitive market amongst issuers to compress prices

maelito• 2 months ago

Adyen refuses small clients, under the million :/

zuzululu2• 2 months ago

they probably dont have the scale for support for anything lower vs stripe

im amazed that stripe is able to handle small guys like me

trumpdong9• 2 months ago

They can't afford it because they have no customers, because they turn down small customers and then Stripe already has them when they become big enough for Adyen.

ExoticPearTree4• 2 months ago

I wasn't with the company when it started using Stripe, but there's really no need to interact with Stripe besides setting up your account and using the API they provide. Since being involved with Stripe, I don't we need to talk to them more than once a year on a "so, all good?" type of emails.

They basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies.

greggsy• 2 months ago

They have resellers

zuzululu2• 2 months ago

doesnt seem like stripe has anything to worry about here the total contract value is of irrelevant scale

i guess i expected it to be more significant seeing that its the UK gov

johannes12343212• 2 months ago

Well, it is signalling. It's signalling that there are competitors which are trustworthy enough for a government and it signals the overall trend one can observe how European governments detach from US companies. With some lower hanging fruit and some larger projects.

aiisjustanif4• 2 months ago

Most government processing is prohibited at Stripe that is why it always tends to be small. Too much risk being exposed to more regulatory scrutiny that is not worth it as payments processor. > “Prohibited Businesses… Government services… Disbursement of government economic support, such as grant” [1] [1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses

fsuts• 2 months ago

They have moved as it also allows payment by paybybank which is the uk direct bank payment service

Stripe globally will be worried as countries seek to cut out the card payment middle man and do direct bank to bank account payments

gib4444• 2 months ago

Got to love the people taking a swipe at the company. They found their market, can't you just be happy for them? They're hardly the only company in the world to only deal with bigger clients.

This site regularly dunks on European tech as being subpar, but when an American company gets ditched for a European one, barely anyone can find nice words to say. You really reveal yourselves in times like this, I've got to admit.

benced• 2 months ago

It's pareto better, all else equal (which, fair, it may not be in this case) for a company to serve businesses from $1 and up than to only serve $5M and up.

throwyui• 2 months ago

All are ditching american tech and what not as much as they could

madhacker• 2 months ago

Good for them. Self-reliance is a good thing especially weaning off hostile Americanism.

aiisjustanif4• 2 months ago

Stripe is an EU and US company dual headquartered in Ireland and subject to the same EU regulations as Ayden. They spend a lot developing and maintaining talent in Ireland.

vanviegen4• 2 months ago

I'm sure Stripe EU is subject to EU regulations, just like Adyen. But unlike Adyen, they are also subject to some US regulations due to being a subsidiary. And, highly likely, they run software systems build by their US counterpart, meaning data exfiltration or even sabotage is trivial.

xp84• 2 months ago

It seems to me like whole Western countries, especially Britain being outside the EU and Eurozone and with its own currency, ought to have at least one big domestically-based option for something this fundamental. It’s an odd thing to have to rely on foreign countries for.

Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?

aiisjustanif4• 2 months ago

Yes, the 3rd competitor to Stripe and Ayden being Checkout.com

Also running payment processor per country would not be an easy feat or probably feasible.

gib4444• 2 months ago

Is there a company that’s basically like “Stripe but British-owned”?

British payment processors usually sell out / get taken over by US firms

Checkout.com isn't terribly British just headquartered there (Swiss guy founded it in Singapore, tons of foreign investors). They opened a SF office last year, after a big US push prior, so if their financials stay adequate I imagine it'll be another that sells out to the US

roryirvine• 2 months ago

Worldpay was the biggest by far, but it never really shook off its legacy image (it had its origins in a couple of 1980s-era payment gateways). Stripe had overtaken it by the mid 2010s, and it has since been dismembered and partially rebuilt by (American) private equity.

The UK tends to punch well above its weight in FinTech, but PSPs are high-volume and very low margin so not really an attractive proposition unless you can be reasonably sure of grabbing a decent share of the global market.

kvgr• 2 months ago

Good luck with integration.

taffydavid2• 2 months ago

It hurts a little that stripe is an American company since it was founded by two Irish brothers. It could have been an EU company to begin with

halapro• 2 months ago

People don't make a company. Stripe exists as is because it's not a EU company.

chinathrow• 2 months ago

Why though? Because they raised a lot of capital in the US? Or because they had access to better talent in the US?

As I see, there are many payment providers in the EU, just not API first as Stripe ever was.

promiseofbeans• 2 months ago

Quite to the contrary: all a company is (at least as originally conceptualised) is the formalisation of a group of people, usually working together towards a shared goal. It’s in the name - just like you have a troupe of actors, you may have a company of engineers and accountants (though to keep in the vein of live stage production, you also have a theatre company).

This is why we tend to use collective pronouns when referring to a company - Meta just announced that they are planing share dilution (though to weaken my own case, one can also use singular nouns, likely due to the increased modern perception of a company as a single entity due to the increased anonymity afforded by the internet)

dbbk2• 2 months ago

But it is Irish. Its HQ is in Dublin.

herculity275• 2 months ago

It has dual HQs. The one in Dublin is tiny (or at least it was the last time I visited), all the executive leadership is based in SF.

sublimefire3• 2 months ago

Stripe is dual headquartered in the US and in Ireland afaik. They tried to avoid having just a satellite in Irl, which other companies do but which makes it harder to take decisions independently.

sparkling• 2 months ago

That may be true, but the Irish corporate entity (Stripe Payments International Holdings Ltd.) is ultimately owned by Stripe, Inc. in the U.S.

If you are looking for payment processors that are ultimately owned and incorporated in the EU: https://eualternative.eu/categories/payments/

jeffrallen• 2 months ago

Good on em. Ayden rocks, and improves European sovereignty.

bArray4• 2 months ago

Adyen will take over GOV.UK Pay card payments for local authorities, police forces and armed forces units from Stripe, as well as pay by bank services, under a three-year contract worth up to £25.3 million.

I would prefer they take this money and either build a payment processor or use an existing UK company. The UK government is addicted to offshoring all contracts it can, and then is surprised when the cheapest possible quote actually ends up ballooning over the agreed amount.

mft_• 2 months ago

and either build a payment processor

Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

use an existing UK company

Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?

bArray4• 2 months ago

Risk, time, complexity, mismatched skill-sets... "getting a new thing built" didn't work so well with (for example) Fujitsu and the Post Office, or the billions spent to little or no avail on NHS digitalisation. Seems to be a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

These projects are possible, it's just clear the current project management structure of the UK government is not up to the task. I would lean heavily towards a UK-based private sector solution.

Are there established UK-based payment processors with equivalent abilities?

This is the point, there should be one, and the UK government could heavily put their thumb on the scale to ensure that payments are processed within the UK.

It seems mad to have foreign companies make money on UK government fund raising activities.

dbbk2• 2 months ago

I'm sorry? Did you just say you want the UK government to "build a payment processor"?

bArray4• 2 months ago

Why is that so insane? Would you be saying the same when the NHS was originally proposed?

It's entirely possible, the fact that the UK government lacks imagination is at great cost to the tax payer. There is no serious long term investment into UK tech, past building AI datacentres for a bubble economy with some of the worst energy rates in the world.

sublimefire3• 2 months ago

If you ever worked with any of the UK gov or agencies you’d understand why it happens. Despite having its own IT in every agency those same agencies buy externally because “it is too difficult”. IT is entangled beyond belief and some of the knowledge is institutionalised. Existing contracts do not make it easier either. Any high ranking clerk is afraid of any risk associated as well. Not to mention the procurement process is hard and lengthy.

bArray4• 2 months ago

I understand, but it's why things are desperate to change. I refuse to believe that the UK is fundamentally unable to rise to these challenges, in which can I can only chalk it up to poor government structure and management. These people have a lot to answer for.

antaviana• 2 months ago

Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain does not work because there is an address verification which is not possible because Spain's credit cards do not share customer address information, so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.

traceroute66• 2 months ago

Will it be possible to pay the UK VAT returns with this new payment platform? Paying the UK VAT return with a credit card from Spain .... so we need to use wire transfer instead, which has a higher transaction cost.

I don't follow ?

Don't they have Wise (previously known as Tranferwise) in Spain ? Or a similar platform ?

Its 2026 and for most people the answer is just to use one of those platforms to pay wire transfers instead of your bank.

Sure there will still be fee of some description, but it will almost always be much lower than what your bank charges for international transfers.

Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen

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