Federated Co-operative Limited Modernizes Transactional Email Monitoring and Reliability

Like many large enterprises with older operational systems, FCL runs core billing and customer data processes on mainframe infrastructure. These systems generate massive volumes of invoices and transaction reports, particularly for their energy business where reliability and accuracy are critical.

Hundreds of thousands of times per month, FCL converts raw mainframe output into PDF-based invoices and sends them automatically to customers over email. As global email providers tighten controls around high-volume sending, FCL was facing increasing delivery uncertainty. Even though customers expected and relied on these transactional emails, changes outside of FCL’s control could result in messages being filtered, delayed, or blocked, without clear visibility into why.

Federated Co-operative Limited wanted to strengthen its transactional email workflow by gaining greater visibility and control over email delivery at scale. As email volumes continued to grow and provider policies became more restrictive, the team needed a way to clearly understand which emails were successfully delivered, which failed, and why without introducing additional complexity into their existing mainframe environment.

The objective was not to replace core systems, but to introduce a reliable monitoring and control layer between automated email streams and recipients. By doing so, FCL aimed to improve overall delivery reliability, proactively identify issues before they escalated, and enable targeted resends when necessary. All while reducing operational effort and dependency on manual intervention.

FCL’s existing email workflow presented several operational challenges:

• Limited insight into failures: High-volume transactional sends could fail without clear reasons or actionable diagnostics
• Resend complexity: When tens of thousands of emails failed out of hundreds of thousands sent, selectively resending was extremely difficult and resource-intensive in a mainframe environment
• Manual workarounds: Attempts to manually reroute or resend failed emails created additional strain on internal teams and secondary systems
• Reliability concerns: Frequent provider alerts and outages made it difficult to ensure consistent, uninterrupted delivery

FCL needed a more robust and transparent email delivery layer that aligned with the scale and complexity of its operations.

Federated Co-operative Limited implemented Retarus’ Enterprise Transactional Email Services to introduce greater transparency and control into its transactional email environment, without disrupting existing mainframe systems. FCL moved several of their automated email streams to Retarus, enabling the team to monitor outbound email traffic in real time and gain clear insight into delivery success and failure as messages were sent.

With this visibility in place from Retarus’ Trace & Recover feature, FCL can quickly identify which emails fail, understand why issues occur, and selectively retry delivery when needed, without reprocessing entire batches or modifying core workflows. This approach helped close a critical gap in FCL’s email automation process and established a more reliable, manageable foundation for high-volume transactional communications.

Since implementing Retarus, Federated Co-operative Limited has significantly improved the reliability and operational stability of its transactional email communications. The team now has clear visibility into email delivery performance, allowing them to quickly identify failures, understand root causes, and take corrective action before issues escalate. As a result, previously time-consuming resend efforts and manual troubleshooting have largely been eliminated, saving up to 200 manual employee hours that typically occurred when these issues arose.

With consistent delivery performance, fewer disruptions, and highly responsive around-the-clock support, transactional email delivery is now stable, observable, and manageable even at enterprise scale.

• Enterprise transactional email volumes monitored in real time
• No reported email outages or delivery disruptions since onboarding
• Selective resend capability without reprocessing entire email batches
• Solution operating at approximately one-quarter of previous service costs

Following the success of the initial rollout, Federated Co-operative Limited is evaluating the expansion of Retarus to additional email streams. With increased confidence in monitoring, reliability, and support, the team sees Retarus as a long-term partner in scaling and safeguarding mission-critical communications. Today, the team operates the platform independently and confidently, with no ongoing blockers or dependencies, but Retarus support is always available as needed.