Most people use Vocalink’s services on a daily basis, although unless you work in banking and finance you may not be familiar with the name.

The company handles most of the UK’s electronic banking transactions, including credit and debit card payments, standing orders and direct debits.

Like many in the finance sector, Vocalink has been an early adopter of service-oriented architecture (SOA) ­ using a platform based on Sun, Oracle and BEA Systems technologies ­ and has faced many of the consequent integration skills challenges.

Nick Masterson-Jones, the company’s IT director, says finding the right people was crucial. “We had quite a few people working on our legacy applications and we retained a large number of them when we moved to the new infrastructure. Some took to it like ducks to water and others didn’t,” he says.

“Our main aim with moving to this architecture was to achieve a high level of reusability. And while we were able to build teams with strong Java skills, for example, we probably only had 10 people who really understood at a fundamental level how we were trying to obtain reusability and give our platform the flexibility we needed for the future. That small core team did all the initial framework design.”

Masterson-Jones says the framework is very much like classic architecture: the core team came up with the blueprints and designs, then Vocalink brought in a much larger team to do the actual development. At peak, the organisation had about 500 people working on the programme.

“By doing the design upfront rather than trying to retrofit it, we were able to leverage a much larger team, including offshore resources, and to work in a very efficient way,” he says.

“One of the things that we also did with SOA was to build a lot of common frameworks upfront to avoid later duplication, such as our security service, which is critical. This upfront work ensured we had the required levels of consistency across all our applications.”

Masterson-Jones also says some skills problems were mitigated because of strong vendor support. “Help from suppliers has improved dramatically over the past couple of years,” he says.

“Back then, people were saying SOA was not going to take off because it was too complex and required too much analysis and architectural work upfront to be effective ­ particularly in the finance sector with its tough deadlines and high-pressure projects. I think the experiences of organisations such as ours is leading to the realisation that while it requires some hard work upfront the benefits do pay off.”

So what benefits has Vocalink seen?

“The benefits to us are primarily around reuse,” says Masterson-Jones. “Vocalink is building the central infrastructure for a new payments service called Faster Payments in the UK, which means electronic payments will in future only take a few hours to clear, rather than days.

“And we’ve been able to reuse elements of the existing three-day clearing service to help us do that, in the process saving a lot of time and a bucketload of money.”