Merchant Services Card Acquisition

Pre-market Engagement for the Provision of a Merchant Service for Essex County Council

Essex County Council (ECC) is at an early stage in procuring a Merchant Service Solution, and prior to formulating any formal procurement opportunity, seeks input from the market. The council is looking for the intended solution to provide the following:

a. Provide back-end Merchant Card Acquiring Services to take all ECC card and wallet type, including but not limited to ApplePay, AndroidPay and SamsungPay or take card payments as part of the day-to-day services provided by ECC. These include but are not limited to all electronic payments, ECC Registration Services, ACL, Blue Badge, Libraries, County Parks and Outdoor Centres and many more. b. needs to be able to supply a variety of hardware solutions including: Fixed terminals, Mobile terminals, Bluetooth terminals, Contactless terminals, Unattended terminals, P2PE terminals, Virtual terminals. c. Need to have accreditation with our Finance System provider Access Suite/ Access Group/ PaySuite as part of the interface. d. Provide any current and upcoming innovations on a quarterly/ annual basis. e. Potential and/or known demand/volumes for requirement, e.g. Six training courses for 10 attendees or volume of goods. Currently, we have 40+ merchant IDs. 29 MIDs are used for terminals supplied by current Merchant Acquirer and rest of them are used for terminals supplied by Access Group and average volume of transaction per annum is c480,000. f. Anticipated interfaces within ECC systems, specifically software/hardware which may need to work on ECC's infrastructure. We will require an interface for reporting purposes. This would be required via HTTPS API, SFTP and secured email with the option for access via Single Sign on access. Answers to questions submitted should be no more than 500 words per question and should be submitted your response via MS Form no later than 5:00 p.m. on 22/11/2024.