Chancellor's Departmental Banking Project (CDBP)

The Chancellors Departments (OPG/H M Treasury, H M Revenue & Customs and National Savings and Investments) are looking to transform the way in which they conduct their banking business. At present all Departments contract independently with the banking industry. After a review the decision has been made to conduct all banking business through the Office of HM Paymaster General (OPG - part of H M Treasury). OPG currently provides account maintenance, payment and receipt processing for approximately 900 public sector bodies, with account maintenance and transaction processing services procured via outsourced contracts. Actual balances of all customers are held overnight within high level bank accounts at the Bank of England and used to reduce overall government borrowing costs.

The new service required by OPG to enable this consolidating and modernising government approach is that of:

  • Provision of a system of accounts, and maintenance of some 3000 individual accounts, to track the transactions and balances of individual public sector bodies and reconciliation to high level accounts at the Bank of England
  • Provision of in-day data and specialised reporting to H M Treasury on payment and receipt flows
  • Transaction processing - BACS, CHAPS etc (see below)
  • Customer advice and support and business development
  • Provision of electronic banking systems with straight through processing capability.

For all of OPG’s customer bodies in the public sector (currently some 900 plus) and H M Revenue & Customs and National Savings and Investment.

Estimated volumes of banking transaction services used by the Chancellor’s Departments in 2004-05 are:

  • CHAPS payments: 100,000
  • CHAPS receipts: 450,000
  • BACS Direct Credit payments: 327m
  • BACS Direct Credit receipts: 6.2m
  • BACS Direct Debit origination: 21m
  • In debit clearing of payable orders and crossed warrants issued: 28m
  • Security processing (reconciliation) of IR and OPG payable orders: 18m
  • In credit clearing of cheques and BGCs received centrally: 24m
  • In credit clearing of cheques and BGCs received locally: 2.3m
  • Inter-account transfers: 500,000
  • Foreign exchange payments and receipts: 14,000 plus
  • Euro payments and receipts: 8,000 plus
  • Merchant acquiring - receipts via debit and credit cards: In excess of 1m transactions
  • Cash handling requirements arising from departments’ business activities, including law enforcement.

Services delivered via the Post Office are not included.

Further Information