Citizen identity and a single front door for 65M people.
The agency needed a single digital front door, but public trust depended on making identity feel safe, accessible, and explainable. We designed the service around verified identity, assisted channels, and a migration plan that retired old systems only when adoption proved stable.
The situation we walked into.
Citizens were being redirected across departmental portals, each with separate credentials, inconsistent identity proofing, and uneven accessibility. At the same time, the agency had to preserve assisted channels for people who could not or would not use digital self-service.
The programme carried unusual scrutiny from parliament, watchdogs, and civil society groups. Technical reliability mattered, but clear governance and service transparency mattered just as much.
A simplified view of the delivery shape, the control points that mattered, and the signals the client team used to keep the program on track.
The changes that made the outcome possible.
Identity foundation
Proofing, authentication, and delegated access flows were designed for both digital-first and assisted use cases.
Agency onboarding
Departments integrated through shared APIs, consent controls, and reusable service patterns instead of bespoke portals.
Accessibility at scale
Design, content, and engineering teams tested with assistive technologies and real user cohorts from the start.
Operations and trust
A live control room tracked performance, fraud signals, accessibility issues, and assisted-channel demand in one place.
How the delivery moved from pilot to scaled operation.
Identity beta
The agency launched identity proofing and basic account services with strong monitoring and assisted fallback.
Priority services
High-volume transactions moved first so the team could learn from real demand and support patterns.
Department migration
Legacy portals were retired in waves once adoption, accessibility, and support metrics cleared agreed thresholds.
National scale
The platform expanded into a common front door for multiple agencies with centralised service operations.
What changed after the transformation settled into the run.
Citizens saw one coherent service
The experience shifted from navigating departments to completing outcomes, regardless of which agency owned the transaction.
Trust improved through transparency
Performance, accessibility, and identity controls were visible to leadership and easy to explain to oversight bodies.
Agencies stopped rebuilding the same foundations
Identity, notifications, and service patterns became reusable capabilities rather than duplicated programs.
The programme earned credibility because it never asked citizens to trust a black box. The experience was simple, but the governance was visible.Director General, Digital Services - National public services organisation