Bank of New York prepares for Bacstel-IP

The Bank of New York has completed its migration to Bacstel-IP, keen to take advantage of the greater security the new system offers.

The bank started planning for Bacstel-IP at the beginning of 2004.

Because of a number of acquisitions, the bank had several different Bacs systems in place to support 100 service users across multiple bureaux, explained Robert Preece, the bank's vice president of banking and treasury operations.

He said in addition to this, as a user of the X400 service for Auddis/Addacs, which was scheduled to be migrated to Bacstel-IP from March 2005, the bank needed to have its plans in place by then.

Preece said the migration was a good chance for the bank to consolidate to a single software offering - and explained it would also benefit from much improved security "which, in a payment processing environment, is a primary requirement".

He said Voca offered advice during the early planning stages and participated in project workshops to help plan the bank's migration approach "which was extremely helpful in clarifying all potential issues".

Because it had complex nature requirements, The Bank of New York chose a single system which used a Hardware Security Module(HSM).

Preece told silicon.com: "This removed many manual stages in the processing flow, further increased security and provided an additional benefit in the ability to automatically collect and distribute reporting on the same day as submission, meaning that we are now able to quickly identify potential problems with individual transactions and resolve them with no impact to our clients."

He said Voca provided a high level of support during testing because The Bank of New York was one of the first HSM users of Bacstel-IP.

All the bank's Auddis/Addacs users were successfully migrated in the first quarter of 2005, ahead of the deadline, said Preece. The remaining service users were migrated in a phased implementation during quarters two and three, he said.

"Overall, the project has been viewed as being very successful," he added.