Paymaster upgrades IT infrastructure

Financial services provider saves £300,000 by modernising its core technology

Payments provider upgrades its IT systems

Outsourced financial services provider Paymaster will reduce annual operating costs by £300,000 and make processing 30 times faster after implementing an application management system.

The application modernisation technology supplied by Micro Focus will move the firm’s core legacy applications from a VME mainframe to a new Windows server.

An added benefit is that Paymaster has been able to improve levels of system availability and security while reusing its core application code and data to minimize risk and expense.

The new system has dramatically improved batch performance and job automation enabling its evening batch to complete three hours earlier.

Paymaster chief technology officer Ralph Tigwell says the savings provided a return on investment in ten months.

‘The performance improvements took us by surprise, with our batch processes completing 10 to 30 times faster running under Micro Focus Cobol on a small two CPU server,’ said Tigwell.

Paymaster (previously the Paymaster General’s Office) provides pensions administration and payroll services for some of the largest schemes in the UK. Its pension payroll services make payments totalling more than £7bn to over 1.5 million pensioners and their dependants, in 189 countries throughout the world.