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Phil Buckley

Digital Transformation Manager

Part of Digital Diplomacy

1st September 2016 London, UK

Help, I’m in trouble! – or third party payment functionality

TOM: Can I borrow some money?
Tom has an awkward conversation with his father-in-law (2)

One of the first experiences I had of an Emergency travel document was covered in a series of photo casebooks I wrote last year. I actually had to cut out some of what happened because you wouldn’t have believed me – but now that you are all desensitised to a man losing his passport between passport control and the plane1, I’ll tell you a little more about it.

Getting an emergency travel document is a hugely valuable service but it is expensive to deliver: the document allows you to enter the UK so there is naturally a fair amount of security attached to issuing them. It costs £100: you can commonly claim this back on your insurance, but it is an upfront cost.

The unfortunate man who had lost his passport was at the end of his holiday and simply didn’t have the money. So, he had to put himself through a 15 minute phone call to his father-in-law, explain his situation – and then ask to borrow the £400 necessary to rearrange flights, get a hotel, and get his document.

TOM: Yes! Between passport control and the plane!
Tom has an awkward conversation with his father-in-law (1)
TOM: Can I borrow some money?
Tom has an awkward conversation with his father-in-law (2)

Our staff on the front line tell us a substantial minority of people are in a similar situation: they have their wallet or purse stolen as well as their passport. To put this into the language of the UK’s Government Digital Service: the primary user need here is to get home; but attached to that is a secondary user need to be able to ask someone to pay for them if they are really in dire straits2.

In many instances, people will be on holiday with friends and family who can help; but those travelling on their own will have bigger problems.

We therefore developed an interesting piece of functionality called Third party payment – the ability to ask someone to pay for you if you are unable to do so yourself for one reason or another.

Towards the end of your application, you are asked how you would like to pay. Our beta started with you being able to choose to pay online or pay when you arrived at the consulate; since February 29th, we have had a third option:

New 'Ask a friend to pay for you' option
New ‘Ask a friend to pay for you’ option

If you ask a friend to pay for you, we ask you a few more details about who you are asking:

Form filled in inviting the user's mother to pay for them
Users can now invite someone to pay on their behalf

At which point, the lucky person nominated gets an email explaining the situation and how they can help. Both parties are encouraged to talk to each other on the phone if possible.

This was the last piece of functionality we delivered and technically it was relatively easy. The harder piece was in designing a good service for those being invited to pay. If you received this email, would you consider it to be genuine? Would you pay? What would happen if you didn’t?

Naturally we worked with security advisors on this and we also user tested it. However, payment screens tend to get an easy ride in user research sessions: people have amazingly few problems paying for services if it isn’t their money. After a slow start however, this has proved increasingly useful to users, with over 60 people safely home thanks to generous benefactors.

The FCO provides other services for people in similar situations so we hope to be able to use this model in other transactions.

Next I’ll write a little about how Emergency travel documents was built technically, before moving on to some of the product management challenges we have faced. Do let me know any thoughts and/ or Dire Straits puns in the comments section below.


Follow Phil on @philbuckley5



1. Since I wrote the blog post, I have heard of someone who claimed to have lost their passport in the tunnel between the departure gate and the plane itself.

2. If you don’t pay your friend back, this is effectively money for nothing.