Electronic payments system goes live

UK banks set to benefit from faster access and administrative savings

Payment processing company Voca has gone live with the next major phase of a £100m initiative to renew its entire technology platform.

The new central XML-based processing database ensures that electronic payments are routed to the right place.

‘We used to hold this data in several databases. Now it’s all in one, which provides less scope for errors or exceptions, and will help banks cut costs,’ said a spokesman for Voca, formerly known as Bacs.

Benefits to UK banks include administrative savings, faster access to payments information online, and a major reduction in exception reports.

Voca plans to complete the overall project by next year, to help cope with rising transaction volumes and compete for new business in other countries.

‘As government branches such as the Department of Work and Pensions start sending remittances direct to people, rather than using vouchers, then we start to really drive volumes up,’ said the spokesman.

Some 400 people have been working on the project for more than three years. When complete, the J2EE-based platform will be able to handle 100 million transactions per day.

The first stage of the project involved changing customers’ interaction with Voca to an online process, known as Bacstel-IP. Organisations have to switch to this service by the end of the year (Computing, 14 July).

The next major milestone was making all UK clearing banks live on Voca’s Reference Data 1.0 service, a process which has just been completed.

The final step will be to switch to a new core payments engine in 2006, which is due to go into testing within months, operating in parallel with the existing system.

Voca worked with Perot Systems, BEA, Oracle and Sun Microsystems on the project.