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VW Steering Group

Our Virtual Wallet Steering Group meets quarterly, and the December meeting was a bumper one, with 25 attendees representing 12 different local authorities and ICBs.      

Here are a few takeaways from the session:

Audit

Following our September meeting, we asked for feedback on topics that the Steering Group would like more discussion on.  The audit of direct payments was top of the list, so our colleague Nicki Bucket was the headliner at the December meeting.  Nicki is in a unique position as she performs direct payment audits on behalf of a number of our clients.  The majority of the accounts that she audits utilise Virtual Wallet but a sizable minority do not utilise Virtual Wallet for a variety of reasons.  Nicki compared the processes side-by-side, highlighting that the elapsed time for the audit of a Virtual Wallet account is between 10 minutes and 1 hour, whereas for a non-Virtual Wallet account it can be anywhere between 2 days and 12 weeks, largely due to challenges around obtaining and reformatting supporting documentation.   This finding was echoed by a number of attendees.   

Review of the year

It has been a busy 12 months for Virtual Wallet, so we took some time to reflect upon the highlights of the year, which include:

  • The mobilisation of five new clients to the point where Virtual Wallet is their preferred default option. 
  • The growth of our Virtual Wallet payroll service from a handful of PAs at the start of the year to over 1,300 PAs now.
  • Four major migrations from incumbent pre-paid card and/or managed account providers to Virtual Wallet.
  • The roll-out of our ‘online enrolment’ module to new and existing clients to streamline the onboarding process. 
  • New contract wins in the last 3 months with three clients. 

Updates

The PPL also spent some time providing updates on current initiatives, which include:

  • Relaunch of the myvirtualwallet website, with improved resources and guidance for new and existing Virtual Wallet users (launched November 2024).
  • The development of our ‘comms hub’ to help LAs/ICBs promote Virtual Wallet (launching December 2024).
  • The total refresh of our PowerBI reporting dashboard (currently in beta, rollout in January 2025). 

Quiz time

We’ve worked hard to condense the Steering Group meetings in to one hour, but we still had enough time at the end to do a Virtual Wallet-themed end-of-year charity quiz.  The winner was one of the representatives from Croydon Council, who selected MIND for PPL to make a charitable donation to in their name. 

Location, location, location?

Over the last six months we’ve been to a few in-person meetings and conferences, and it is fair to say there has been a buzz that you often don’t get from an online meeting.  When we’ve tested the water with the Virtual Wallet Steering Group members about holding the meeting in-person, the response has been lukewarm due to the limitations they face with the time and cost involved in the associated travel.  It’s a shame, as it feels like online meetings have fallen from the pedestal that CV9 put them on.  Because we’re a bit geeky here at PPL, we started doing some sums after the meeting.  We could lie and say it was for fun, but we were really trying to justify the meeting being online.  Based on the locations of the 20 people that attended the Steering Group (which ranged from Yorkshire in the North, Lincolnshire in the East, Devon in the South, and mid-Wales in the West), our sums suggest that the combined travel time would have totalled a whopping 152 hours if we had held the meeting centrally in London.   There were too many ticket-types to estimate the expense of trains, so we paused to think about the environmental impact of the combined carbon footprint.

What’s the point of this?  Aside from the time and cost savings, and despite what Mr Musk may say, the point is that an online meeting CAN be fun, engaging, productive and collaborative.  Here is what a few of the Steering Group members wrote afterwards in the chat:

  • In relation to audit: “That makes much more sense now.  Can we pick this up in our Account Management meeting next week.”
  • In relation to the comms hub: “This is amazing, when we started, I had to create all of these resources myself.”
  • In relation to the PowerBI refresh: “Again this is sooo much better than the before. I am grateful for the additional information I can now see and that it is visually easier to view.”

That being said, we do absolutely recognise the value of face-to-face time, which is why our Account Management and Support Team are committed to spending at least one day every three months on-site locally with each of our clients.  We use the time to meet with our key contacts, as well as the wider stakeholders such as care management staff, local partners, providers & PAs and of course the individuals that utilise direct payments.  We are finding that this is the most productive use of ‘in-person’ time.