The initiative, started in October 2003, introduces many new features including enhanced performance and reliability for Charter One consumer and small business users.

The new online banking site is being run on Corillian's industry-leading Voyager platform - commonly referenced as the most scalable platform in the industry. This new platform will allow Charter One to make enhancements more frequently and quickly while still ensuring high availability and speed for the end user.

"We are committed to providing the best products and the greatest value in banking," said Mark Grossi, Charter One executive vice president and chief retail officer. "This means providing our customers with the features they want and the means and access to conduct their online banking the way they want to do it. Our goal is to make our products and our online service the centerpiece of the customer's financial relationships."

Many enhancements were added to the new site including personalized navigation, a built-in transaction register to make record keeping easier, a detailed session summary that records all transactions while the user is online and many others. These new enhancements are additions to what is already considered one of the best online banking sites in the country by Gomez Inc., the Internet quality measurement firm, with such features as FYI Alerts, free online bill payment, free online checking images, and more.

"This was an enormous undertaking, and we're extremely pleased with the results," said Michael Dobbins, Charter One senior vice president of direct banking. "In just five months, we were able to not only build this new platform but migrate over 700,000 users with almost no interruption in service."

"Charter One's core competency is banking, and our core competency is online technology solutions," said Alex Hart, president and chief executive officer of Corillian. "Charter One's team was able to make decisions quickly and let us do what we do best; that was a key part of what made this aggressive timeline possible. Our priority is to provide industry-leading online banking software and a reliable and secure hosting environment for our customers. We look forward to working with Charter One to develop many new and exciting features to ensure Charter One maintains its position as a leader in online banking."

Dobbins noted that the bank is also on schedule for its previously announced introduction of a highly integrated account aggregation and bank-to- bank funds transfer service. This service will leverage another new partnership between Corillian and Cash Edge Inc. This feature will allow customers to not only see their accounts from virtually any U.S. financial institution but make moving money between those accounts as easy as moving it between any of their two Charter One accounts.

Charter One has several additional online banking features planned for 2004 including the addition of ACH, Wire Transfers and tiered login authority for small- to medium-sized businesses.