Overall Project Executive Summary

The EU-Pay service provides a multichannel, Europe-wide, payment collection mechanism for public authorities, which integrates seamlessly with existing payment methods. Its usage does not require any specialist knowledge, the underlying system is completely transparent and it makes a significant contribution to improving Accessibility for All and reducing the Digital Divide. Citizens who do not have credit cards, bank standing order mechanisms or access to or knowledge of the Internet are able to use it to pay bills from public authorities when, for example, shopping at the supermarket or when using a mobile phone.Parts of the service were already in place in different localities across Europe with all stakeholders involved, and the project market validated different services in different locations to different sets of users in different local realities through a wide range of payment channels. The users of the service were citizens and enterprises who need to make payments to Public Authorities, and Public and Private entities that used the EU-Pay circuit for collecting their payments. The delivery mechanism is the Internet, the base technology is a set of dedicated web servers protected by a firewall and the use of secure transfer protocols.

The identity of the service users was verified via strong authentication mechanisms. The technologies used to implement the front ends of each implemented channel depended on the specific channel, but these were existing technologies in wide usage (e.g. Call centres, GSM, Supermarket POS, PC, Kiosk).

The EU-Pay consortium consisted of 6 contractors and 2 members in 6 European countries and 5 pilot sites were used.

Following the successful market validation, a new Europe-wide company will be set-up to manage the service infrastructure with local subsidiaries being responsible for the management of the different payment channels in the different countries.

Below is a document produced at the beginning of the project to describe the objectives, goals and success criteria of the project. As the project is now in its final stages, these factors are being reassessed to determine the success of the project. Results of this evaluation will be published soon.