How quickly time can fly. Four years ago, my Christmas post mentioned the start of our role as Consular Digital Services partner to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) - an important UK Government client with the opportunity to do genuinely impactful work. This year, my Christmas post starts with the news that we say farewell to our FCDO colleagues as that work is now complete. 

The FCDO-CYB partnership has been a great success, leading the digital transformation of government and shifting global FCDO services into the 21st century, in the process making peoples’ lives easier and safer when they live or travel abroad. Over 2024, we have delivered the final 4 key facets of the global service transformation:

• Emergency Alerts

• Getting Married Abroad

• Low-volume Notarial services

• Self-service Consular Enquiries - the first public-facing FCDO service built with Large Language Model (LLM) technology

Each of these is a major success and everyone working on these teams has achieved results that we are extremely proud of - I’ll say more about what’s special about each one of these below. 

This year has also been successful in other areas. We made significant investment in areas of social value - most notably with our 3rd sector community tech platform Give A Little that facilitates cashless donations, but also in our xGov sharing and reuse activities. And this month CYB has become an approved supplier to the NHS and other public sector healthcare organisations. 

There’s a lot to talk about before casting forward to the new year, so let’s get started…

Emergency Alerts

One of our first recommendations for FCDO consular services was a new emergency alert capability to proactively communicate with British nationals abroad in situations of risk and crisis. This important new service will leverage both SMS and IP messaging and is planned to be turned on when global events allow a soft launch. This service is increasingly important as we’ve seen this year with a harrowing year of conflict in Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Haiti, Colombia, Central African Republic, Myanmar, Syria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This Christmas we reflect on the growing challenges of armed conflicts each year and the terror, grief and chaos they create, and sincerely hope you and your families stay safe when abroad.

Getting Married Abroad

In contrast, every year 14,000 British nationals celebrate their big day by choosing to get married in a foreign country. This should be easy to organise, right? But the laws, policies and paperwork required are decided by each country - and with 228 countries and regions in scope, turning these paper journeys into a digital service becomes a complex undertaking! This very hard sudoku-type puzzle revealed its secrets progressively to the team using lean agile techniques and iterations to evolve the new digital service globally. Ultimately the complexity was handled in 5 mini-services which are easy to maintain and support going forward. If you, or someone you know is getting married abroad then I suggest raising a glass to the team who pulled this off - and our congratulations to you too!

Low-volume Notarial services

Across all these countries there are minor boutique services provided by FCDO via its embassies and consulates that may only have a handful of applications every year. Transforming these paper-based journeys into digital services is hard to justify given the cost. We undertook a project to do just this whilst keeping development and maintenance costs very low. The results have been successful and surprising, with the team finding a method to rapidly research, design and build a wide range of unique journeys, such as applying for a Panamanian drivers licence - yes that’s right, you’ve now got an FCDO online service for that licence (you never know when you might need one!).

Self-service Consular Enquiries 

People seeking FCDO help can now self-serve in seconds, whereas they previously might wait up to ten days at peak times. In July this year, our self-service enquiries work culminated in FCDO launching the UK government's first public-facing AI LLM solution. By August we had rolled out globally and the most recent data confirms:

• 80% reduction in FCDO written enquiry handling

• 65% reduction in in-bound voice calls through enquiries via GOV.UK

This business success is exactly what we mean by transformation, with the team holistically combining service thinking with technology innovation. Previously it was impossible to use generative AI without serious risk of hallucination, data leaks, deception, or prompt hacking. To meet user and business needs, we developed an innovative way to employ generative AI that disables these inherent risks while conforming to law, policy and standards, with 100% accuracy. We think of this as Government Grade AI, albeit it will be useful in many private sectors as well. 

The service will save FCDO £M’s, allowing staff to focus on vulnerable cases while maintaining the AI themselves using tooling we shipped with the solution. I would emphasise that our multidisciplinary team, working closely with FCDO civil service colleagues, was key to success. Beyond the breakthrough engineering and technology effort, both the insights and steering from research and decisions made in user experience across interface and content design were essential.

xGov sharing and reuse

This year we shared our learnings in how to use AI ethically, safely and responsibly in our AI in Government Meetup (sign up here) and across 7 talks at industry conferences, and to government communities of practice. 

We also built templating functionality into our open source xGov Form Builder project (see: XGovFormBuilder), allowing us to serve personalised content depending on dynamic content from a user’s answers and/or other contextual configuration (e.g. country-specific requirements). This enables a dramatic reduction in the number of pages that need to be built to handle complex user journeys. For example, for the FCDO Marriage Abroad service GOV.UK smart answers were previously maintaining 1,451 separate outcome pages but we were able to decommission all these and our service maintains just 37. The Government Digital Service has estimated this is saving them 312 hours per year. This project also continues to be used by other suppliers to deliver government services more quickly and with higher quality, for much greater value.

Give A Little

This year we continued to invest in Give A Little, CYB’s point of donation service. We all know that the 3rd sector is a significant factor in social stability and I’m happy to report that in the new year the Give A Little community will celebrate:

• 10,000 not-for-profits signed up to the service

• £50M in donations

• £2M per month raised on average 

Importantly, our dedicated team has become a strong part of the UK charity community and collaborates closely with our many fantastic partners to achieve a growing positive impact.

Looking forward

We are currently discussing work for 2025 and who we can help. Our foremost capabilities in full-service digital transformation and technology innovation, most recently with AI, will no doubt be where we will continue to deliver strongest value. We are advocating to use our skills to support NHS England and other health and social care organisations, and earlier this year we kicked off by applying for a place on the Crown Commercial Service’s Digital Capability for Health Framework 2. It was a difficult choice given the cost and effort of competitive bidding - as despite servicing buyers across the health sector with £1.2B of spending over the next 3-5 years, only 20 suppliers were to be selected. I am pleased to say we won a place on DCfH2, and we’ll look forward to demonstrating how our approach as a supplier to digital transformation - being specifically thoughtful, rapid, considered, and high quality - can help the sector in 2025 and beyond.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in particular for all the kind help we’ve received over the year from our many close collaborators and supporters.

All of us here at CYB wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Ben