Years after UK Post Office scandal broke, Accenture and OneView Commerce bag contract to replace Horizon

PaaS + IaaS

Service tries to move on from troubled decades of Fujitsu relationship with £410 million in deals for system that hurt so many

The UK Post Office has
awarded Accenture and OneView Commerce contracts worth £410 million to
replace its troubled Horizon systems, which contributed to one of the most serious
miscarriages of justice in British history.

Accenture has won the
bidding to replace incumbent supplier Fujitsu — which built the error-prone PoS
and finance system starting from 1996 — on a so-called Walk In Take Over basis.
It is set to stabilize services and upgrade software as it prepares for a
complete business transformation and manages the migration to new SaaS. Its
deal is worth £269 million for five years plus two optional single-year
extensions, according to a procurement notice. 

The lesser-known OneView
Commerce — a provider of retail and inventory management SaaS — has won the £141
million agreement to provide software to “transform [the Post Office’s] retail
technology platform to meet evolving business, operational, and customer
requirements,” according to a tender notice. The system is set to be cloud-hosted,
in an AWS or equivalent environment, and allows bespoke customization according
to the Post Office’s needs. It is expected to include ePOS, mobile services, customer
engagement and insight, and self-service kiosks, among other features.

The Post Office began
rolling out the legacy Horizon IT system for accounting in 1999, along with two
subsequent upgrades. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 subpostmasters were
wrongfully prosecuted and convicted over errors resulting from the computer
system, devastating lives in the process.

A statutory inquiry into the mass
miscarriage of justice launched in 2021 is ongoing. Its first report was
published in July last year, finding that senior Post Office staff in the UK – and those
working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the
defects causing errors in the Horizon system. It also found that 13 lives were
lost through suicide, most likely as a result of the Post Office prosecutions,
in which Fujitsu assisted.

In May 2025, the state-owned company gave up on its plan to build a replacement for Horizon in-house and launched
the £410 million procurement process, which Accenture and OneView Commerce would win.
Failed bidders included IBM and Escher Software, a provider of retail and
ecommerce software. ®