Voca revs up payments engine

The system at the heart of the UK's automated payments infrastructure has been replaced without missing a beat.

Earlier this month Voca went live with its new payments engine, which will process 5.5 billion transactions (worth £3tr) per year.

The system, built by Voca for Bacs Payment Schemes and its 13 member banks, has been designed to speed up transaction clearing times and back-office processing.

Martin Wilson, chief commercial manager for Voca, told silicon.com: "It's been running in a production environment for some months. The weekend before last we had sign-off from the UK banks and [the changeover] went smoothly without a hiccup.

"We've seen 165 million transactions in four hours - that's the equivalent of Europe's daily volume. This weekend we take away the old system."

The old mainframe has been replaced with a system built on equipment from BEA Systems, Oracle and Sun to give the company more options to make changes to payments procedures in the future.

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Check out silicon.com's Cheat Sheet for the lowdown on the Single European Payments Area.

The payments engine, which processes the UK's direct debits, credits and standing orders, is part of the critical national infrastructure and processes more than 90 per cent of the country's salaries, 70 per cent of household bill payments and the majority of state benefits.

The financial services industry as a whole is subject to a fast-changing regulatory environment. One of those regulations, the Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa), is set to handle cheaper and faster cross-border transactions, which led Voca to the redesign.

Wilson said: "The platform is built around a rules-based architecture. You can define the rules by the way a payment is processed.

"Because of the way it's designed it can handle different types of payments. We recognised the payments landscape was changing. It will merge Sepa payments and schemes from other countries."

The back-office system also manages settlement, transaction tracking, anti money-laundering, plus fraud and credit checking.