Paymaster saves £300k with mainframe move

Financial services provider Paymaster has saved money and speeded up its operations by modernising its core banking systems and moving to a Windows server environment.

Paymaster's banking processes are running 10 to 30 times faster and the company is saving around £300,000 per year since implementing the new tech, it said.

The company - formerly the Office of the Paymaster General - co-ordinates the payable orders for public sector organisations, in particular pensions and payroll administration.

A payable order is similar to a cheque but with added features, such as a computerised and permanent record of payments issued to a person.

Ralph Tigwell, CTO of Paymaster, told silicon.com the company's IT system is "basically the back-office functioning of the Bank of England" and it processes around 9.5 million payable orders per year with a total value of around £7bn.

Tigwell said with further expansion, the IT suite could process payments totalling around £15bn - which is another four to five million more payable orders per year on top of what the system processes already.

He added: "If the system picks up this extra work, which we're planning to do and go live with next February, then it has pretty much swept up most of the payable orders that occur in the government."

Paymaster used Micro Focus application modernisation technology to move its core legacy applications from a Trimetra mainframe to a Windows server environment, after Fujitsu announced its plans to withdraw support for its Trimetra mainframe line by the end of April 2006.

The migration was completed within 10 months and Paymaster has also been able to improve levels of system availability and security, while reusing its core application code and data to minimise risk and expense.

Tigwell added the return on investment happened within around eight and a half months of implementing the modernisied banking systems.