Jade hopes British deal will end sales drought

By ADAM GIFFORD

Christchurch's Jade International has completed its largest Linc conversion project yet, for British mortgage processing bureau Homeloan Management.

Jade markets its technology as the successor to Linc, which company founder Gil Simpson created as a development environment for Unisys mainframes.

Homeloan Management, a subsidiary of Skipton Building Society, processes $57 billion of mortgages a year for 30 banks and building societies.

Jade chief executive Rod Carr said it was a significant endorsement of the technology, and should help lift what had been disappointingly slow sales.

Carr said Jade was targeting 17 other large financial institutions in Britain with Linc systems.

It is also spent the past year working out which of the 400 North American Unisys Linc customers offered the best prospects, and had signed three sites for conversions over the past four months.

Homeloan Management expects the conversion, which took a year, will pay for itself within two years.

IT director Chris Wood said the company would be able to speed up development of new applications and services at minimal risk, because of the way Jade 6 complemented technologies such as IBM WebSphere.