The Co-operative Banking Group has renewed its 17 year-old IT services deal with Steria, extending it till "at least" May 2014 as it continues its Group Transformation programme and prepares to integrate 600-plus branches of Lloyds, for which it is the front-runner.

Jim Slack, business leader of IT operations and development at the bank, said: "Our partnership with Steria is based on trust. Our relationship with Steria has already delivered many successful business-critical projects and services, including a number of highly strategic undertakings. Both parties remain committed to continually drive out cost and improve productivity, innovation and quality."

Gavin Chapman, chief operating officer of Steria UK, said:"we recognise that the need to continually improve is more critical than ever in these challenging financial times. Steria will continue to help reduce risk through our knowledge of the bank's systems and strategy. In particular we are continuing to work hard to ensure the success of the Co-operative Banking Group Transformation Programme."

The bank's Financial Transformation Programme began in 2008 and involves the replacement of its core banking systems and complete overhaul of its payments systems with the installation of a Clear2Pay Payment Hub.

As part of its core Financial Transformation Programme, the Co-operative Banking Group is installing a centralised Teradata data warehouse platform to re-engineer the bank's accounting processes.

Teradata won the contract in partnership with Microgen, which develops specialist software that will be used to feed financial data into the data warehouse, which integrates credit risk and accounting data into a single environment. Predicted benefits include increased usability of data, reduced management overheads and improved time efficiency.

The bank wanted to augment this new operational environment, which has already been delivered in its corporate banking business, with a business intelligence environment, for which it chose Teradata and its Financial Services Data Model as a solid foundation for credit risk and accounting-based business intelligence. The model is expandable to the entire enterprise so that other functional business intelligence can be added in the future.

Within the programme, the Microgen Accounting Hub and Microgen Aptitude is used to feed the general ledger and the Teradata data warehouse with finance information.