The Student Loans Company (SLC) is commencing a procurement exercise to appoint its third Strategic Partner to provide a wide range of services across the Technology Change and Integration area within SLC's Technology Group.
As part of its ongoing commitment to improving its service to customers, SLC has undertaken an ambitious programme to transform the commercial framework and delivery models leveraged across SLC's estate when working with strategic technology partners, developing enhanced capabilities while delivering better value for public money.
The company has previously completed two competitive procurement exercises to appoint strategic technology partners to support the development of its Customer Enablement Services, with a focus on application development, and Platform Delivery and Technology Services. The third strategic partner will be appointed to deliver expertise, services, capabilities, and capacity to support SLC in the delivery and enhancement of a broad range of key internal and external business applications and services, as well as the decommissioning of legacy services.
Stephen Campbell, Chief Technology Officer at SLC said: "The strategic partner model allows us to work with a small number of firms to develop, deliver and support our technology estate and the digital services we provide to customers. I am pleased with progress so far, and very encouraged by the range and strength of responses from bidders in the first two rounds of procurement.
"In this third procurement we are looking for a partner with deep expertise in relevant Commercial Off the Shelf (COTs) and Software as a Service (SaaS) tools and technologies, and experience of working with Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to simplify, remediate, enable and transform a broad range of key technology services."
Working in conjunction with its partners in the Department for Education, Devolved Administrations and the Cabinet Office, SLC has developed a procurement strategy that provides the most appropriate, compliant, public sector route to market for each lot within the programme, based on the complexity and stability of the in-scope services. The fourth procurement is expected to be released to the market later in September 2021.
