Banco de la Republica - Central Bank of Colombia

Ports its main and critical information systems to open platform, using software tools and consulting services from XSEED Software, and turns off its Unisys mainframes, achieving large direct financial results and substantially improving the services level offered to country's Banking system.

Banco de la Republica (Central Bank of Colombia) is a legal entity with public jurisdiction to issue legal currency and control Colombia's monetary, credit and foreign exchange. As one of its 75th anniversary initiatives in 1998, the bank began restructuring its Internet presence to deliver information to clients with optimum efficiency

The DCV Application

The need for greater efficiency - and flexibility - was most apparent in the bank's digital securities database, known as the 'Deposito Central de Valores' (DCV). The DCV relies on real-time transactions, aiming to speed dealings in the secondary market, eliminate risk of handling physical paper and facilitate payment of principal and risk coupons. However, the previous DCV system was simply unable to cope with the real-time demands.

Until September 2003, the system ran on a Unisys mainframe, Linc/EAE/Cobol code and DMSII database. The combination of the traditional GUI 80 x 24-character interface and rigid printing system meant the DCV just could not keep up. Recurring bottlenecks - often during crucial transactions - were naturally unwanted but unavoidable.

Project History

Through an international public biding process, where were present one company from Holland, two from US (including Unisys), and another one from England, XSEED Software was selected to execute the DCV system migration project from LINC / EAE / DMSII to XSEED / Java (J2EE) / Oracle, running on SUN Solaris platform.

Migration project was entirely conducted by XSEED with integral support from Banco de la Republica's technical and end user team. It took only seven months from the very beginning until a smooth production of DCV application in September / 2003. Since that time this system is running 24 x 7 hours with no downtime.

Some special characteristics were specifically developed by XSEED to incorporate to this project, such as: restricted security mechanism for on-line transactions; remote printing management; transactions auditing.

Besides direct economies achieved with Unisys mainframe deactivation, Banco de la Republica moved to a better service level for its end users the commercial and public banks network in Colombia because of better system uptime and better response times. The information access flexibility allowed in this new platform coupled with remote printing simplification also improved service level.

“Maintenance budget and system downtime is being reduced noticeably. Previously, we would experience about one hour's downtime a month when a software problem occurred. Now any major software problem is corrected in less than five minutes and night reports have gone from hours to minutes.”
F. Mauricio Pinzon, IT Director, Banco de la Republica.

Proven Capacity

“Xseed's role was crucial, they migrated all the system or business rules from LINC to Java using their software” acknowledges Mr. Edgar Rodriguez, who managed the project. 

“The technical abilities of the whole internal team (the bank employees), project leader, software engineers, database administrators, and testing group were of a high professional standard. After all issues associated with testing were ironed out, the implementation process was very smooth.” Adds Mr. Francisco Rivas, Deputy Manager (CIO) of Banco de la Republica.

Central Bank of Colombia migration project was another successful project in the XSEED Software history of more than 100 projects dealing with legacy migration to open platform, using J2EE technology. XSEED migration solution can be used to a variety of legacy systems, such as COBOL / LINC / EAE / CSP / NATURAL / SADS to Java / Visual Basic / Oracle / DB2 / SQL server / Unix / Linux / Widows Serve.