UK payment firm Voca has completed a five-year £100m replacement of its IT infrastructure to meet Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) requirements and allow for same-day payments.

Voca processes 90 per cent of the country’s salaries, 70 per cent of household bill payments and the majority of state benefits.

The new infrastructure will allow the organisation to dispense with the existing three-day clearing period in the UK and process payments on the same day.

Voca IT director Nick Masterson-Jones says the new system will be able to cope with a 12 per cent annual rise in electronic payments, which Voca anticipates will hit 100 million transactions a day by next year.

Masterson-Jones says the upgrade was a response to growing automated payment volumes and a changing payments landscape across Europe.

‘Across the European Union (EU), the introduction of SEPA will mean that banks need the capability to process cross-border payments as cheaply and quickly as domestic ones,’ he said.

‘The new system has enhanced our ability to compete internationally and we are looking at opportunities to work with banks across the EU to ease the transition to SEPA.’

Voca has replaced its Fujitsu mainframe with open-standards technology based on BEA Systems, Sun and Oracle. The payments engine is one of the largest J2EE business applications in the world and provides improved security, flexible clearing cycles, 24x7 capabilities and IP-based submission channels.

Voca’s previous payment platform was based on technology that was coming to the end of its life, says Masterson-Jones.

The old system processed 78 million transactions on a peak day, but didn’t have the capacity to cope with growing volumes. The payments engine can now process the equivalent of the entire daily automated payment

volumes of the EU in four hours.

‘We needed a flexible infrastructure to offer banks in the UK more differentiated services and to provide services towards our European strategy.’

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