A leading UK retail financial institution relied on a legacy Unisys Heritage Platform for close to five decades – a system that had served as the backbone of its payment processing operations.
While many customer accounts, such as current accounts, had already been migrated to SAP Banking Services, numerous key processes still resided on legacy systems. These included standard orders, savings products, BACS processing, mandates and Visa clearing.
To support its strategic goal of modernisation, the organisation launched a Payment Centralisation Programme designed to accelerate decommissioning of the legacy platform by migrating all payment processing to SAP S/4HANA Payment Central.
The scale, complexity and age of the legacy Unisys Heritage Platform posed a significant obstacle to the organisation’s ambitions. After nearly 50 years of operation, the system had become technologically inefficient, costly to maintain and misaligned with the rest of the organisation’s evolving SAP landscape.
Although some account types and financial processes had successfully transitioned to SAP, other critical payment services remained fragmented across legacy and modern systems. This resulted in disparate data flows, duplication of effort and inconsistent processing logic – increasing operational risk and limiting agility.
Furthermore, payment-related processes touched virtually every part of the technology estate, passing through multiple applications, subcomponents, databases, middleware and customer-facing channels. Migrating these interconnected flows to SAP S/4HANA Payment Central without disrupting business-as-usual operations represented a major challenge.
The organisation needed a strategic solution that could both simplify its architecture and lay the foundation for a unified, scalable payments ecosystem – all while maintaining uninterrupted service for millions of customers.
Working in close collaboration with the client and other partners, Bancon enabled the foundation release of SAP S/4HANA Payment Central which facilitates inbound BACS processing — a three-day payment scheme predominantly used to support payroll, pension payments and social benefit payments.
A key enabler was the design, build and roll-out of the strategic blueprint for future payment accounting and reconciliations on SAP S/4HANA Payment Central. This included the technical enablement of a simplified payments architecture, designed to support both current and future migration releases.
The approach ensured that payment processing could continue seamlessly during the transition, maintaining full business continuity for all non-migrated flows. The phased approach provided a clear, controlled pathway away from legacy dependency, supporting the client’s wider objective to modernise and streamline its payments infrastructure.
Bancon’s subject matter experts were embedded in the end-to-end delivery of the programme to increase knowledge of the chosen application, enhance awareness of its capabilities and minimise deviation from standard processing. Bancon experts were deployed across architecture, infrastructure, product specification, requirements gathering, process design, test management, training and 24/7 application support.
The programme delivered measurable outcomes in performance, reliability and customer experience:
• Successful processing of approximately 120 million BACS transactions, representing a total value of approximately £42 billion, through SAP S/4HANA Payment Central.
• Faster processing speeds and enhanced reconciliation, advancing straight-through processing rates and delivering improved customer experience and operational efficiency. The client processes a significant volume of time-critical disbursements to vulnerable customer segments, making improved processing times imperative to uphold its commitment to fairer banking.
• Foundational release of SAP S/4HANA Payment Central, a strategic real-time payment platform that has a roadmap that includes card clearing, settlement, direct debit instructions and CHAPS.
• Post go-live aftercare in the form of 24/7 Application Support services provides proactive defect prevention, reactive fixing and continuous monitoring, ensuring the platform remains always-on for customers across the country who rely on the service.
This first release marks the successful migration of incoming BACS payment flows onto the new SAP S/4HANA Payment Central platform, with future releases in-flight.
This milestone marks a key step in the organisation’s long-term transformation, providing a modern, resilient payments foundation and moving one step closer to full legacy decommissioning.
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