INTRODUCTION Co-operative Financial Services was formed to bring together The Co-operative Bank, Co-operative Insurance Society (CIS) and the Internet bank smile, under common strategic leadership. It offers a complete range of financial products, from high street banking to Internet banking, from current accounts, credit cards and loans to stakeholder pensions, unit trusts and insurance as well as independent financial advice. It is one of the largest financial services organisations in the UK, with more than 6 million customers, and it has assets under management worth around £30 billion. BUSINESS CHALLENGE With the growth of on-line banking, Co-operative Financial Services identified a need for a consolidated presentation platform for their on-line services. This included CBIBS (aka PBIBS, the bank’s Internet banking channel), Pioneer (Branch) and smile. Project Monroe was created by The Co-operative Bank, to deliver the platform which, to date, is the single largest strategic project the organisation has carried out. It became clear that the creation of a single presentation layer/architecture with which to deliver current and future on-line services was needed. The key deliverables for the project were the successful migration of existing on-line services to the Monroe architecture, in a common framework encompassing object and infrastructure reuse. In order to deliver this successfully, on time and to budget, it was critical that Co-operative Financial Services selected highly skilled partners which could be relied on to deliver. SOLUTION Thesaurus was chosen as a preferred partner to provide hardware, leading technical infrastructure and architectural services, with longer-term production and development support to the project. This included the following services and hardware solutions. Enterprise class IBM pSeries hardware. IBM middleware, WebSphere application server. Database architecture and support, IBM, DB2 and UDB. High availability and HACMP. Specialist security skills. Specialist integration and e-commerce. Ancillary skills such as TSM and service automation. RESULT The first release of Project Monroe, which went live in August 2003, was hailed as an outstanding success, of which we had made a key contribution. Project Monroe continued to roll out using a managed, phased approach. The smile Internet banking service went live on Monroe in October 2004, and Pioneer during September 2005. Mike Green, project manager, commented: “The selection of Thesaurus as a service provider in this area was based on their ability to bring the right leading-edge skills, consistency and ownership to the table. It is also important to recognise the value of good account management, integrity and cultural fit, and I’m pleased to say that their performance on this project has exceeded our already high expectations of our services partner.” BENEFITS Ian Thompson, technical stream leader for Project Monroe at Co-operative Financial Services, said: “Monroe is the largest strategic project the bank has undertaken. The first release (CBIBS) went live, I am glad to announce, without a hitch, on the 19th August 2003. Customer feedback has been phenomenal. Since going live we have received more than 16,000 customer e-mails congratulating the bank on the new, improved CBIBS service. The professionalism Thesaurus has demonstrated is a credit to the culture which the company promotes.”