The Australian government's search for savings in the delivery of welfare and health payments has entered a private consultation phase with every major bank and potential vendor now lining up for meetings in Canberra with the Department of Human Services.More than fifty banks, lobby groups and payments technology vendors made submissions in response to a request made late in the third quarter of 2009 for responses to a discussion paper from DHS: Better Dealings with Government: Innovation in Payments and Information Services. Most pitched their expertise in various elements of payments and card projects.The key task remains unifying health and welfare records and streamlining the payments process - without replicating the previous government's Access Card project that Labor opposed at the last election.Marie Johnson, the chief executive of the Access Card, is heading up the Better Dealings project. Johnson's strategy of using off-the-shelf solutions as far as possible seems to have survived, with the discussion paper asking industry to provide solutions to a list of given problems.The biggest issue of all is achieving savings and better coordinaton of information management across DHS functions.The Crossroads Bank of Social Security, from Belgium, is providing a model of something that might fit the bill. The discussion paper raised the issue of establishing a central information database and electronic transactions broker modelled on the Belgian Crossroads agency.The Crossroads model uses a unique identifier for each person receiving a health or welfare benefit, a key element of the Access card project.Bringing Medicare and Centrelink records together is a key part of this challenge and just before Christmas the minister for human services, Chris Bowen, announced the beginnings of this potentially significant merger of two core agencies.For now, some of Medicare and Centrelink's back office admin functions are being merged, but not client data records. Twenty offices will be co-located.