Development of a secure payment system with online authorisation for council services and bills linked with back office systems.

http://www.camden.gov.uk/pay/
Parking ticket or customer account details are required to progress through this live payment system

		Service selection	Customer login	Payment card

The London Borough of Camden is a large metropolitan council and has consistently led the way with Internet initiatives. The Government's requirement for councils to provide all services online by 2005 is a demanding challenge and London Borough of Camden undertook to deliver three key payment services in early 2001. London Borough of Camden provided a specification for the project and BOCC successfully tendered for this work.

BOCC demonstrated to London Borough of Camden our ability to provide web-facing services and existing payment systems. In particular, BOCC's comprehensive knowledge of networking provided for an integrated response from a single vendor.

London Borough of Camden developed a walkthrough of the main user process steps with BOCC. BOCC advised on methods for data transfers between London Borough of Camden and BOCC and then developed a modular system(1) so that further payment types (council tax, business rates, etc) could be added in the future with the minimum of time and reduced testing.

The design had to cater for a very wide range of browsers (versions 3-6), operating systems and match existing visual identity standards. The design also had to complement the existing Camden Connect website and ensure that the service users could navigate through the process without confusion.

The facility allows payment of parking fines, business rates, commercial rents, council tax and housing rents over the web. Account data balance files are exported each night and used to update the website. There is live online payment card authorisation using Datacash's merchant services(2) and receipt generation (as printable web pages and optional email). Each day's payment transactions are transferred by Virtual Private Network (VPN) back to London Borough of Camden, imported and processed automatically into the existing financial systems without any re-keying.

The online payment system took 3 months to complete, including beta testing.

London Borough of Camden implemented four payment services well ahead of any other council. It has provided alternative payment methods for service users and reduces internal workload for payments made in this way.

Since launch, two further services have been added - housing rents and commercial rents. The system is now being extended to feed payments for other services through the payment module. For example, people can now view bus lane contravention CCTV images online, using a further module developed by BOCC, and this links directly into the Camden Connect Payments system.

The payment system is hosted on a server, separate from London Borough of Camden's main web servers, as part of the security requirements. Account balance files and payments files are encrypted and transferred using a virtual private network (VPN) between BOCC's servers and Camden's network.

The completed Internet-facing system is hosted on a BOCC managed server, monitored 24 x 7 by our own systems staff. Apart from the initial payment selection screen and associated help pages, the site uses SSL technology(3) to encrypt data passed between the user's web browser and the server. All validation activity is undertaken on the server, minimising the requirements for the user's browser and computer and thus making the online services available to as wide a cross-section of users as possible.

Although not initial requirements, consideration for future support for the Euro(4) and multiple 'shopping basket' type payments were built into the system design by BOCC. By considering aspects such as these early on, future extensions become less complex and quicker to implement.

In 2005, the payments system was extended to allow interlinking with any third party application so that miscellaneous payments could also be processed and the current design of the main website applied.