The Central Bank of Costa Rica has migrated its interbank electronic payments and transaction system (SINPE) to Microsoft .NET technologies.
The mission-critical application handles more than $500 million in transactions through an average of 100,000 daily exchanges between domestic and international financial institutions.
The conversion project, undertaken by Microsoft and ArtinSoft, entailed the migration of 1.3 million lines of code from Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET.
Luis Zumbado, director of SINPE technologies for the Central Bank of Costa Rica, says the upgrade will enable a sharp increase in developer productivity and reduce interbank transaction time and overall operational cost.
The Central bank used ArtinSoft's Upgrade Wizard, which ships with Visual Basic .NET, to manage the upgrade. Ninety per cent of the code conversion was handled automatically. As a result, development time was reduced from 88,000 developer hours for the initial application to 6,400 for the .NET migration, less than 10 percent of the original effort. The entire project took less than four months.