Voca will work with international IT system developers BEA, Sun and Oracle to create a new payments engine that has an upgraded capacity which achieves the level of performance required by the European Union’s Single European Payments Area (SEPA) network, due to be launched in three years’ time.

Voca, which facilitates Direct Debit services in the UK, will utilize BEA’s WebLogic Server to replace its existing mainframe-based payments engine, which lacks the scalability and functionality demanded by SEPA.

We needed a flexible, generic and modular payments infrastructure. One that comprised reusable common elements of hardware, network and software. And one that delivered an industry-wide generic security model. Overall, we felt that none of the vendors we evaluated could match BEA WebLogic for performance, flexibility and scalability, said Chris Dunne, commercial business manager at Voca.