ACT Financial Services Ltd.

I worked on contract for ACT for just over three years. Although their offices were in Birmingham I was based in Newent, Gloucesterhire where I rented 2 small offices in the grounds of a small hotel.

My basic role involved troubleshooting and handholding clients when they first moved over to Quasar; Quasar being the trade name of the unit trust management system that ACT sold successfully to many large financial institutions.

Quasar was written in the MUMPS language which I had become proficient in and was able to 'repair' as required.

MUMPS is a highly efficient 'database' system; many of the problems occured when an overnight process was interupted or failed. To fix the problem usually required investigating the code to establish where the problem had occured and restoring the affected areas of the database (from the backup), and then re-running the process that had fallen over.

In a typical week I would fly to two or three different locations where the clients were based. ACT had a European presence and I regularly flew to Jersey and Amsterdam as well as all over the UK.