Each message has a title, an icon and an effective date and time which dictates when it gets displayed. In the majority of cases, the effective date of a message is set to the current date but in some circumstances configuration settings are provided which dictate the effective date. For example, when a payment is issued by the system, a message is generated and the effective date is set to the current date since the message is valid from today and should be displayed to the citizen. However, when a service is scheduled for a citizen, it may not be appropriate to display the message immediately if the service has been scheduled for two months in the future. In this case a configuration setting is provided to dictate the number of days before the start date of the service that the message should appear in the citizen account i.e. This date will be used to populate the effective date. Messages from remote systems are displayed based on the effective date specified in the web service.