The core banking applications transferred were spread over 17,000 programmes and 6,000 screens developed in Natural 4GL.

The migration comes at a time when private banks, along with other financial organisations, are looking to cut costs by using developments such as cloud computing, although some figures in the industry remain concerned about issues such as security and robustness of the system. The term “cloud” relates to the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server.

"The mainframe applications fully addressed the needs of business for many years. The migration let us preserve the investment in the existing system, while adding value by moving it to a scalable, open environment,” Luc Dosquet, deputy CIO at the bank, was quoted as saying.

Eric Mely, chief technology officer at SGBT, was quoted as saying: "The migration of our mainframe system gave us the opportunity to move these mission-critical applications to the bank's private cloud. Our private cloud has facilitated the delivery of different environments, and was able to allocate resources to virtual machines where needed, thanks to its flexibility.”