Alliance & Leicester's commercial banking arm Girobank has extended its online bill payment system to enable government agencies to establish their own branded Internet service.
BillPayPlus enables any organisation to accept credit or debit card payments securely over the internet - through their own Web site.
This new development comes at a time when the Government is anxious to speed-up the availability of local authority transactional Web sites in order to meet a 100% delivery target by 2005. So far, they believe, there are only four local authorities with such sites.
BillPayPlus allows a number of products to be included, for example, business rates, council tax, parking fines, rents, homecare, leisure facilities, waste management and utility bills on-line.
The new service is based on Girobank's two-year old BillPay system, which has 100,000 registered users making payments to 200 organisations.
Russell Carter, senior marketing manager for Alliance & Leicester commercial banking arm Girobank, says: "The key advantage for bill paying customers of BillPayPlus is that they have no need to move from an organisation's own Web site and they can make payments using either credit or debit cards."
The extension of the service comes as Unisys continues its dialogue with UK banks and billers on the establishment of a commercial bank-centric EBPP system.