| [ Lexcelerated News ]
May 2002
Lexcel® Announces
Participation in High-Profile Universal Banking Services Post
Office™ Card Account (POCA) Group
The United Kingdom Government announced that it was
making an operational assumption that around three
million people will open the universal banking services
Post Office™ card account (POCA). There are currently
16 million people using Post Office branches to collect
their benefit payments. Benefits will be delivered
either through the Post Office card account, a basic
bank account or their existing account.
Citicorp Electronic Financial Services’, Inc.
(EFS) role in the project is to provide management,
data processing and integration services for automated
benefits distribution through Electronic Benefits Transfer
(EBT) for more than 30 state governments.
The United Kingdom Post Office needed to open access
to customers who did not have access to traditional
bank accounts accompanied by debit and credit card
processing capability. There are millions of these
“un-banked” customers in the UK who are expected
to generate an extremely high volume of transactions
per year. Citicorp identified the necessity to perform
extensive and frequent transaction testing. To perform
such testing, Citigroup in association with EDS, IBM,
and UK Post Office chose to contract long-time supplier
of testing systems, Lexcel. Citicorp has been using
Lexcel TestSystems® internally to test its EBT
interfaces since 1997.
The Lexcel TestSystems are being used for unit, system,
and regression testing in its implementation of the
ACT benefit-providing software – POCA. Citicorp
and EDS are also using Lexcel’s CAPSystem™
for stress testing and capacity planning to determine
the optimal hardware and software configurations to
support POCA. The Test System enables them to connect
to their development and test environments at any time
of the day and test. Minimal training is required as
a result of familiarity with Lexcel applications and
usability consistency across Lexcel’s products.
Ed Koslow, Senior Director of EBT Services at Citicorp
described Citi’s purchase decision: “We selected
Lexcel to provide a test system for our POCA interface
because of the reliability of their products and service.
Even our international partners were familiar with
Lexcel and decided to use Lexcel for their testing.”
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