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Nationwide announces £1.3 billion investment in digital innovation

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Tony Prestedge

Nationwide Building Society has announced plans to invest £1.3 billion in digital innovation, as part of a broader £4.1 billion investment plan.

The investment will create between 750 and 1,000 jobs and finance the opening of a new dedicated technology hub.

Tony Prestedge, Nationwide’s deputy chief executive, said it was “seizing this moment with confidence”.

The new technology investment will address six areas, being:

  • Simplify: Radical simplification of underlying application and infrastructure estate to enable growth. This will increase innovation and enable greater efficiency.

  • Technology platform: Developing a greenfield digital platform to build the necessary foundations to develop products and propositions that will serve member needs of the future and exploit the opportunities created by emerging platform business models.

  • Member experience and channel transformation: Continue to invest heavily in branches by creating a unique service experience on the High Street, integrating video, social media and face-to-face channels.

  • Digitising the society: Improve the service experience and the cost efficiency in equal measure, delivering enhanced value for members.

  • Data: Simplifying Nationwide’s data estate, including reducing current data stores from 20 to two. Also increasing investment in AI and machine learning to drive a step change in analytics and insight capabilities.

  • Investing in people: Open a technology hub for Nationwide in the UK to support digital and data transformation, employing between 750 and 1,000 people over time.

    • Mr Prestedge said: “Nationwide is in an incredibly strong position, something we’ve achieved through understanding consumer needs and serving members on their terms. Testament to this is that we have over recent years realised record membership, customer service and financial strength and security.

    “As a mutual we can afford to take a longer-term view rather than focus on short term gains. The pace of technological change means that we need to reassess continually how we serve our members in order to remain relevant, valued and competitive. We are therefore seizing this moment with confidence as we set ourselves up to succeed long into the future.”

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