Management Toolkit

National Savings eyes e-services

Kable

Published: 17 Aug 2004 14:50 BST

The UK's state banking service, National Savings and Investments, has agreed on a contract extension with its IT supplier said to be worth £400m, it confirmed on 17 August, 2004.

National Savings has not yet signed a contract with Siemens Business Services, but it has agreed the five year extension "in principle". A spokesperson for the National Savings told Government Computing News that the new deal would make further development of e-services possible.

"We are looking at ways to appeal to regular savers. We will be working together over the next 12 to 18 months to appeal to people to save more regularly.

"We have just introduced a premium bonds by phone service and there's more we want to do to make our services more accessible. Both partners will continue working behind the scenes to do this."

Siemens won the contract in 1999 and initially found it tough going to meet the demands. According to a National Audit Office (NAO) report last year, Siemens "underestimated" how difficult it would be to transform National Savings and Investments' operations in one of the largest outsourcing projects undertaken by a government agency.

The NAO said that in particular SBS "encountered a number of problems" when attempting to transfer existing business from legacy IT systems to new computer platforms. But the deal has since been recognised as one of the UK's more successful public private partnerships.