Healthcare services and Information Technology company McKesson Information Solutions has bought EigerPAY Gateway from Eiger Systems.
The technology will enable McKesson’s Bureau Managed Service customers to access BACSTEL-IP, the new payment submission platform from BACS, scheduled to replace the existing BACSTEL service by 31st December 2005.
McKesson’s Bureau Managed Service produces more than 600,000 monthly payroll statements for the National Health Service – a number which is set to double upon completion of the Electronic Staff Record – and currently manages over Ј5 billion in salary and creditor payments on behalf of all its customers via the BACS service.
As a result, the switch to BACSTEL-IP has given McKesson the opportunity to re-evaluate their existing BACSTEL system, ensuring that any new technology implemented can meet the needs of the company and its clients, both now and into the future.
Designed to be highly scalable, with the ability to cope with significant volumes of transactions and handle multiple BACS Service User Numbers and accounts, EigerPAY Gateway is especially suited to the bureau environment. Through its client-server architecture the solution can be extended to support as many users as required, meeting the growing business needs of customers without compromising the security or usability of the system.
BACSTEL-IP also offers companies submitting payment files the ability to automate elements of the submission process, subject to the installation of an appropriate Hardware Security Module (HSM). Already widely used in financial services and e-commerce, HSMs provide an established ‘tamper proof’ technology that allows secure communication of sensitive information. This security is enabled through the use of dedicated hardware to store identity credentials and to perform fast and robust encryption and decryption of data.
In addition to offering a more secure solution, deploying HSMs within EigerPAY Gateway will also enable McKesson to remove a large proportion of the manual intervention that was historically required when submitting payments to BACS. Operating in an unattended mode not only brings about benefits of automation, but also reduces the potential for human errors and fraud.
“McKesson’s main customer in the UK is the NHS, which of course is one of the world’s largest employers,” says Steve Whitrod, Vice-President Technology and Standards at McKesson. “The sheer volume of transactions we have to process as a result clearly puts a high value on automation. We have therefore chosen to use HSMs not only to enable us to achieve internal efficiencies in our business processes, but also to ensure we can do so with the highest levels of security.”