Voca’s five-year-long migration off the mainframe has slashed running and software licence costs, and allowed the firm to invest the money saved in pursuing new business opportunities in Europe.

The payment services provider, which was formerly known as Bacs, is funded by the 12 largest banks and building societies in the UK and employs 400 staff. Voca handles electronic payments between bank accounts, as well as processing direct debits, direct credits and standing orders.

Voca started its payment processing infrastructure replacement programme in 2002 because, according to IT director Nick Masterson-Jones, its four Fujitsu/ICL mainframes were very reliable, but were not fit for the future.

‘The physical boxes had come to the end of their life, but to replace them would have been very pricey,’ he says. ‘The applications were traditional monolithic Cobol ones, which meant that if you changed one little thing, you had to retest everything, which was also very expensive. But because we had ambitions in Europe as well as the UK, we needed a new architecture to serve customers more flexibly.’

Due to the scope of the initiative, Voca implemented the project in two parts. The first element, which took until 2005, involved developing and rolling out the Bacstel-IP public key infrastructure-based online portal.

The portal enables about 60,000 business customers to send and access payment information and receive transaction confirmations in real-time. The user interface was formerly a ‘green screen’ accessed over a dial-up connection, and transaction confirmation took place by mail.

The second stage of the scheme involved replacing the mainframes with four Sun Microsystems’ F25K boxes running Solaris, the 10i database and BEA Systems’ WebLogic application servers. It also entailed rewriting Voca’s payment processing applications in Java, using SOA principles and Rational tools rather than waterfall development methods.

This phase started in September 2004 and was completed in July 2006 with the help of Perot Systems, which had supported and maintained Voca’s mainframes since December 2001 and provided a mix of onsite and offshore resources. Full-time headcount for the duration of the initiative was about 400 staff, which included contractors and the company’s 150-strong IT department.

‘A project like this has to be tackled in manageable pieces so we had more than 40 projects in our portfolio,’ says Masterson-Jones.

‘This requires industrial-strength planning, but we also designed a proof-of-concept to remove some of the technical risk and show that we could achieve the desired throughput. We also did a lot of analysis work on business cases.’

He says the organisation also undertook ‘massive amounts’ of testing and ran the old and the new systems in parallel for seven months to reconcile outputs and prove it ‘was good to go to our satisfaction’.

The migration means that payment clearing now takes place in real time rather than three days, and new applications can be written at a fraction of the price because production code can be reused rather than starting from scratch.

Voca also plans to start offering payment processing services to European customers in 2008, when the Single Euro Payments Area initiative comes into force.