A government entity created to support financial wellbeing has signed a new and updated engagement with a core technology supplier with which it has worked for more than two years
The Money and Pensions Service has signed a new and expanded multimillion-pound contract with its core “digital delivery partner”.
In September 2022, the service – an arm’s-length body of the Department for Work and Pensions – entered into a three-year agreement with London-based tech consultancy Solirius. That engagement was valued at £11.5m and was intended to equip the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) with a supplier that could assist with digital projects from conception to delivery.
According to a commercial notice published in 2022, the deal, which is slated to run for another seven months, covers a “digital delivery partner to support MaPS across the entire length of the project lifecycle, [including] discovery, pilots, concepts, alpha, beta and build, thus allowing us to create continuity of deliverables across the digital estate, but also in approach and quality of value delivered”.
A new procurement notice, released last week, reveals that MaPS has signed another contract with Solirius. The new agreement is dubbed ‘Digital Delivery Partner 2’ and came into effect on 12 December.
With a term of two years, the engagement is shorter than the previous digital delivery deal – but has an estimated worth of more than twice as much: £24m.
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From now until December of next year, the supplier has been retained for “the provision of skills and capabilities across all DDaT (digital, data and technology) family skills, for both development and relevant support services for Money and Pensions Service”.
Among the major digital projects being overseen by MaPS is the £300m Pensions Dashboard Programme (PDP), which is intended to provide citizens with a single online service for accessing information on both the state pensions and any employer or private schemes in which they are enrolled.
With the final delivery date of the scheme having been incrementally pushed back from 2019 to October 2026, the government recently announced that it remains committed to finishing a project that continues to be “a challenging and complex undertaking”. The programme has undergone a full reset and is now working to a revised implementation plan.
In addition to overseeing delivery the dashboards project, MaPS remit is to promote financial wellbeing by providing citizens with information and support across five core areas: pensions; debt; general money guidance; consumer protection; and national financial wellbeing.
The DWP entity was created in 2019 and, although it operates as a public body, the organisation is funded via levies on financial services firms and pension providers.