Payment clearing house Voca is about to start running
its new IP-based £100m payments engine in parallel with its
existing system.
Parallel running will continue until both systems produce fully
reconciled output. Chris Dunne, head of IT and operations business
management at Voca expects this be completed during the third
quarter of 2006.
Dunne said, “We have a significant project team to take
information from the new and old system, identify differences and
reconcile them.”
The test is essential to ensure transactions produced by both
systems are identical as business rules running in the old system
have not been mirrored on the new payments engine.
Dunne said, “With the old system, business rules grew
organically. The new payment engine gave us a chance to tidy up
business rules. We collaborated with the banks to build consistent
business rules.”
The new system is a Sun Solaris–based system, which has been
developed in Java, using the BEA Weblogic 8.0 application server
running on an Oracle 9i database, and will eventually replace the
existing mainframe payment engine.
Voca has already provided the banks with the specifications for
the new business rules so that they can adapt their own back-end
systems.