Canada's National Trustco selects Premier software.

The second-largest independent trust company in Canada has signed a contract with Premier Solutions Ltd. for the technology firm's trust accounting software.

National Trust Co., a subsidiary of Toronto-based National Trustco Inc., will install Premier's Global-Plus system over the next 12 months.

The value of the multiyear contract was not disclosed.

John Payzant, National Trust's senior vice president of trust, investments, and treasury, said the new system would be "an awful lot faster than the prevailing system."

The software will also enable the company to track investments in many countries in local currencies. Mr. Payzant said National Trust's current system does not provide multicurrency accounting.

200 Offices

The company, with about $29 billion of assets under management, operates 200 offices across Canada. Its businesses are trust, custody, and private banking.

The deal is also important for Malvern, Pa.-based Premier, which underwent a few rocky years in the late 1980s and early 1990s after BankAmerica Corp. failed to get the firm's trust accounting software to work properly. The San Francisco-based banking company wrote off $80 million as a result.

But Premier righted itself under new management brought in by its majority shareholder, the venture capital firm Safeguard Scientifics Inc. A major decision was reached to rewrite Premier's software to run on computers from Digital Equipment Corp.

The Tower Group, a Wellesley, Mass., consulting firm, has estimated Premier's revenues have risen to $23 million this year from $4 million in 1990.

"We are very pleased that National Trust has chosen Premier," said Jay Mossman 3d, chief executive of Premier.

Mr. Payzant said that when National Trust executives were shopping for a new system they "examined everybody's warts very, very closely.

"They are not one to not learn from their mistakes," he said of Premier.

Mr. Payzant said that in addition to the DEC hardware, National Trust would be buying "several hundred" personal computers that will share processing tasks in what is called client-server computing.

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