Decision details

The purpose of this report is to gain authorisation for the procurement of a new prepaid card solution for services that are provided by the council and potentially its local partners.

The council is initially proposing to use prepaid cards to arrange payments for five services, as set out in Table 1 Paragraph 1.2 below, for a total of around two thousand clients. Other services including Barnet Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) have expressed an interest in using prepaid cards.

Current prepaid card provider

The current prepaid card service within Barnet Council is with a provider called Wirecard UK & Ireland Limited.  The current Wirecard contract was novated from the previous provider Citibank Europe PLC in 2017.

As set out in the table above, Wirecard currently provide cards to 385 users. The main reason for the low take up (compared to the 1,850 clients the Council is now looking to serve) is that the product does not meet the Council’s requirements and is not flexible enough to be used in all cases. This is shown in Barnet’s Requirements Specification document within the enclosures, which indicates which requirements can and cannot be met by Wirecard.

From discussions with Wirecard, officers have concluded Wirecard are not able to develop their product to meet all current requirements. The decision has therefore been made to look for an alternative provider capable of meeting all requirements.

Once a decision has been made about a new provider, officers will terminate the contract with Wirecard allowing sufficient time to migrate users to the new solution.

Benefits of a new pre-paid card solution

For those payments where funds are currently provided to clients via external client bank accounts providing an accurate record of payments received and expenditure made is therefore dependent on clients regularly returning bank statements and receipts for goods and services purchased. This is time-consuming and sometimes difficult for clients, and the council does not always receive comprehensive returns. Significant officer time is therefore taken up with the monitoring and chasing of returns, and not all accounts can be regularly monitored given current resource constraints.

Prepaid cards enable on-line access to account statements along with detailed transaction information. Transactions would be fully auditable and allow for surplus funds to be identified and returned to the Council where appropriate.  Expenditure on non-eligible care items would also be identifiable. This will allow the Council to make better use of officer time, and recover any unspent or misspent funds.

Investigation of prepaid card provider costs

Officers have investigated the prepaid providers available on two existing framework agreements and developed a cost model showing the maximum and minimum likely costs for each of the services requiring prepaid cards. This shows an estimated total cost of between £350,000 and £490,000 over five years, dependent on which framework and provider is used, and the actual numbers of cards used.

Procurement process and recommendations

To simplify the contractual arrangements and ensure timely implementation and realisation of benefits, officers propose:

• That the Council procures a single prepaid card provider to initially be used across Adults & Communities and Families Services, subject to the provider’s solution being able to meet the Council’s requirements, and based on the most economically advantageous option.
• To use an existing Prepaid Card Framework Agreement. This is likely to be either: the Surrey, North East Procurement Organisation (NEPO); G-Cloud 10; or Crown Commercial Services Prepaid Card Framework.
• That the term of any contract entered is for an initial period of 3 years, with an option to extend for up to a further 2 years.

That if a new provider is procured, the current contract with Wirecard is terminated and clients are transitioned over to the new provider.