Publication
Between August 2024 and July 2025, I was on secondment from Opencast to National Savings and Investments (NS&I) – the UK government’s savings bank.
My secondment – the first Opencast has made into government – was part of the Civil Service Digital Secondment Programme, designed to supplement and extend the skills available to government across a range of digital projects and challenges.
The secondments programme aims to bring in new businesses (especially SMEs) and insights that had not previously been part of the Whitehall pool of expertise.
Opencast is committed to supporting the government in its mission to grow its digital skills and capabilities. As a business, Opencast recognises the value of secondments from industry and I know we were delighted to be among the first businesses to support the programme through active secondments.
I’ve worked with central, local and devolved government teams, as well as different private sector employers, but being on secondment into government was very different. I was essentially going back to being a civil servant for a year. The last time for me was in 1998 when I finished two very happy years at Ordnance Survey(and still had red hair).
I’ve always been an admirer of the genuine spirit of public service that pervades government, across all the main political denominations, and the vital job they do – so this opportunity was also an honour.
National Savings and Investments is an arm’s-length body, set up when the Victorians were pioneering new ways of running an industrial economy. It has always been owned by the Treasury and, although it directly employs only around 250 people, manages £240 billion for 24 million UK citizen savers and raises billions of pounds a year for the government.
Its USP is a 100% guarantee that investors funds are secure. It has famous products like Premium Bonds but at its core is a range of savings products, carefully calibrated not to undermine the private sector retail savings market.
NS&I does not operate as a ‘true’ bank – but as the ‘UK Government savings bank’ it does raise money loaned by savers through its products, which then provides the government with funding for public investment.
It operates under strict banking rules, with fraud and money laundering prevention big drivers. NS&I also has a policy-driven remit to encourage saving and support for marginalised and excluded groups.
NS&I also runs a large business-to-business (B2B) platform leveraging a licensed banking platform services to support HMRC and Court Funds Office operations, as well as policy initiatives such as Help to Buy, Help To Save and Tax Free Childcare.
NS&I operational and customer services were previously outsourced to a single supplier, which managed its IT operations and call centres.
NS&I benefited from disentangling its banking and policy expertise from its delivery operations – but it found that its existing outsourcing model limited its ability to respond in a nimble and proactive way to changes in policy or the market.
So, in 2021, NS&I started on a journey to transform its business, moving it from a single to a multi-supplier operating model. It wanted the programme to help it fulfil its vision to become a self-service digital business with support for vulnerable and excluded people.
It completed procurement into the new programme in 2024.
The revised commercial operating model aimed to help NS&I to work directly with best-in-class suppliers delivering its products and services – a huge shift and undertaking.
Underpinning the existing NS&I estate is a ‘banking engine’, which is coupled with the organisation’s business processes. The transformation of the service will decouple NS&I business rules from the operation of a new banking engine.
There is a dedicated team building a secure cloud-based integration platform, which acts as a focal point for all the information flowing around the organisation and is the means by which old services can be decommissioned and new ones introduced.
The pressure of new delivery and commercial arrangements on the organisational capacity have required additional skills and experience. With ramifications across the NS&I estate, the change was not straightforward for the business.
My role as a secondee was to join a new in-house enterprise architecture team to support this transformation. Though the broad EA principles were familiar, this was a new technology area for me.
I was really interested in the business problems and with the different nature of how I was working with the customer (if customer is even the right word). Being a form of civil servant, albeit one on secondment into the service, was different to a normal consultancy – so it was quite liberating that I could share my thoughts and opinions without constraint.
Onboarding into NS&I was friendly but lengthy and rigorous when compared to the private sector. It and covered both civil service and banking codes of practice as well as organisational structure and roles. The commercial environment was also complex, with many suppliers and integrators trying to forge a new way of collaborative working, and revisiting that with a new System Integrator partner brought in during 2025.
For the first six months of the secondment, I worked on supporting a commercial and technical resolution for one of NS&I’s supporting packages – the B2B platforms that provide services to HMRC and CFO.
During my time working on the commercial discussions, I was trying to help reverse engineer a complicated legacy estate and the processes by which a replacement had been procured.
This was difficult but extremely interesting work and was a good introduction to the original baseline for the major retail transformation programmes that NS&I have initiated.
For the second half of my secondment, I moved to the ‘retail - customer facing’ side of the transformation programme, to work on customer identification and access management (CIDAM).
CIDAM was identified by as a priority and blocker across many strands of the programme – so it was given an owner, with me as a technical point of contact.
There had already been early thinking and the work really took off after a dedicated service designer was brought in and focused on this area.
CIDAM was top of the list of cross-cutting issues that had to be addressed by suppliers. I offered a continual informed presence on the discussions, workshops and design discussions. I was at all times supported and often guided by wonderful colleagues.
Working with other members of the EA team, we came up with a design and approach that became a basis for cross-team working and is now seen as an exemplary model for a list of other cross-cutting issues.
The NS&I secondment was great for me on a number of levels. From a personal perspective, this was a mixture of the familiar – working with the government on EA issues and transformation – and the unfamiliar – I learned a great deal about banking technology and the detail of customer identification and access management.
That was fascinating and challenging in itself, with the additional difference of being fully part of the team as a secondee. I have worked ‘badgeless’ for much of my career and there is a very good collegiate spirit among the suppliers, but they are in the end responsible for delivering to their contracts.
I think perhaps what I brought was experience, and the ability to maintain friendly relations – I have a familiarity with how complex and sometimes hard some of these large contracts can get and how unpicking the detail of some tangled technical and user issues even in smaller areas can unlock wider collaborations and get things moving again.
I have seen structural and process changes on contract work with great success elsewhere in government, notably at HMRC Digital and I was able to share my experience and confidence that this was the right path.
I was I suppose an additional pair of eyes and even though I needed support I was able to keep things moving and free up clever people to do more elsewhere.
I’d strongly recommend secondment to and from government. You see the inside of very complicated and important operations that can only really be addressed at a national scale, and you meet deeply impressive and public-spirited people from within the civil service and their delivery and transformation partners, with a different perspective.
I felt trusted to work on difficult problems, and free to express my opinions, and given support without hesitation from remarkable people. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity and all the help and friendly support I received.
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