BACS BUREAU SERVICE · UK public procurement notice

NOTICE OF INTEREST: BACS BUREAU SERVICE

Who we are

We, as a shared services arrangement of four councils (West Northants, North Northants, Milton Keynes City and Cambridgeshire County), are seeking to gather insights from the BACS Bureau Service market.

Please note that we are only assessing the market to gain indicative costs to inform the production of a Business Case. We are not undertaking a procurement exercise at this stage.

What we are looking for

We are currently seeking to understand indicative supplier pricing for a BACS Bureau Service, to potentially outsource our shared service bureau function currently managed in-house.

A. Scope of BACS Bureau

Number of clients: 12

Number of Service User Number (SUN): 65

Types of BACs transactions: Direct Debit (80% of total transactions) and Direct Credit (20% of total transactions)

Indicative annual transactional volumes: 6 million transactions

Indicative annual transactional value: 6 billion GBP

B. High level BACS Bureau provision requirements

1. BACS Submission & Processing

Act as a BACS Approved Bureau provider

Ensure seamless, accurate processing of BACS files without manual intervention.

Handle direct submission to BACS under provider's own BUN.

2. Compliance

Ensure full compliance with Tier A BACS audit requirements.

Provide documentation and support for regulatory inspections.

Maintain a secure environment for BACS processing in line with industry standards.

3. Incident Management & Support

Offer support for file submission failures and urgent incidents.

Maintain SLAs for troubleshooting and resolution of processing issues.

4. Reporting

Provide status reports, logs, and audit trails for each submission.

Allow access to processing activity logs via API or dashboard.

Send email alerts or notifications informing us of processing outcomes.

Support BACS report downloads (ideally with advanced distribution capabilities, e.g. per SUN, per Org), unless users are required to retrieve them directly.

5. File Transfer & Integration

Accept BACS files via secure transfer (i.e. SFTP, API/Web Services).

Ensure seamless API or UI-based extraction of processing activity logs