This week we welcomed the achievement of a further two milestones on our delivery roadmap. We opened commercial onboarding and we enhanced the functionality of our test simulator. That’s two important steps further in our OTS journey. 

Well over 100 of you have completed step 1 of onboarding, so please come along, and finish the onboarding process by completing commercial onboarding (step 2). For those of you who haven’t onboarded yet, you can complete both steps one after the other, and you should complete both steps whether or not you are using a managed access provider.  You can find more detailed information on our dedicated ‘onboarding’ page on our website.  

 As the summer holidays are coming to an end, we are anticipating increased engagement with you. To accommodate this, we’ve doubled our capacity for connection testing using the test harness. Don’t forget you need to book a test slot by emailing our service desk. Our technical team will support you throughout.  

What’s more, from Monday we will be opening OTS Integration Testing. This is an exciting milestone as it enables you to test the entire OTS process with another CP using test data. Please sign up with us to be among the first CPs to exchange messages with each other on the hub. 

To help you on the journey to the planned OTS go-live on 14th March, we are continually updating our website to provide more information and support. You’ll find a ‘Getting Ready for OTS’ page that includes a suggested checklist of activities. Additionally, we have dedicated pages for each major topic, including onboarding, testing, and selecting your managed access provider. Be sure to explore our comprehensive Q&A section; for example, we added today a new item about planned penetration-testing dates. If you can’t find the information you need, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are here to assist you 

For those of you waiting for mTLS and API key capability (available in all our environments from 20 October), from mid-September we are giving you an early opportunity to try these protocols in User Acceptance Testing. If you’d like to help us with that and get an early look at the platforms, please get in touch. 

Lastly, I am very pleased to publish our draft User Agreement and Schedules for your feedback by 15 September. You’ll see they reflect the unique and co-operative nature of the hub and OTS implementation. We look forward to hearing your comments.  

That’s it from me for this week!  

 Enjoy the weekend. 

 All the best  

Paul