Nationwide Building Society enhances customer trust
Seamless communications turn challenges to opportunities
Industry
Banking
Banking Services Transformation: Unlocking Exponential Value
Highlights
- The unexpected insolvency of a key communications vendor posed a significant challenge to ensuring the continuity of over 8 billion annual member interactions for Nationwide Building Society.
- Nationwide recognised it as an opportunity to modernise, strengthen resilience, and accelerate innovation to enhance customer experience and drive continuous customer engagement.
- TCS, a longtime partner, responded with urgency, context, and precision, assembling a 24x7 global engineering team that built a new communications platform from the ground up in record time.
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Introduction
In July 2023, Nationwide Building Society encountered a pivotal moment in its operational journey.
The unexpected insolvency of a key communications vendor posed a significant challenge to ensuring the continuity of over 8 billion annual member interactions—communications that are vital for delivering mortgage updates, rate changes, and savings notifications. These touchpoints are central to the trust that Nationwide has cultivated among its members for over 140 years.
The situation presented a unique opportunity to reassess and enhance Nationwide’s communications infrastructure.
The potential consequences included:
- Regulatory exposure due to missed or delayed communications.
- Member dissatisfaction from disrupted service.
Rather than viewing this as a disruption, Nationwide recognised it as a strategic inflection point—an opportunity to modernise, strengthen resilience, and accelerate innovation to enhance customer experience and drive continuous customer engagement.
Strategic Response
Nationwide turned to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a long-standing partner with over 12 years of contextual knowledge and delivery excellence.
The objective was to ensure seamless continuity while building a more agile and future-ready communications platform. TCS responded with urgency, context, and precision, assembling a 24x7 global engineering team that built a new communications platform from the ground up in record time.
Together, the teams achieved remarkable outcomes:
- Seamless migration to OpenText Exstream on Microsoft Azure, ensuring uninterrupted communications.
- Rapid ramp-up of skilled talent to deliver compliant, business-critical templates.
- Continuity of all critical member communications across print and digital channels.
- Timely delivery of essential member communications, maintaining regulatory integrity.
- Implementation of a resilient in-house platform, reducing external dependencies and enhancing control.
This proactive transformation enabled Nationwide to avoid costly alternatives and positioned the organisation for sustained growth.
TCS has been our strategic partner for over two decades. They are a very important part of our fabric. And we really respect and value the partnership.
Creating Long-Term Value
This milestone became the launchpad for wider customer experience transformation.
Under Nationwide’s long-term vision, TCS has since delivered several member-first future ready initiatives, including:
- Digital Vault migration, delivering £3.2M in infrastructure and licensing savings, while modernising document management across 3.6 billion records.
- Marketing transformation with real-time decisioning and personalised journeys powered by next-gen technologies.
- Push notification capabilities, projected to reduce communication costs by £300K annually—while increasing reach and responsiveness.
- Sustainable, paperless member journeys, aligned with environmental, social and governance goals and operational excellence.
- Digital asset management and simplified workflows using modern platforms.
- Ongoing transformation of fraud case investigation journeys—delivering faster outcomes and enhanced member trust.
- Internalisation of key processes, enabling faster decision-making and improved governance.
TCS - Nationwide Partnership of contexual knowledge and delivery excellence.
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Resilient outcomes
This collaboration exemplifies how deep strategic alignment, shared purpose, and technical excellence can turn operational challenges into long-term opportunity.
By combining Nationwide’s commitment to its members with TCS’s domain and technology excellence, the two organisations co-created a resilient, scalable, and future-focused communications platform.
Nationwide is now better equipped to deliver on its core promise: to provide trusted, reliable, and innovative services that support its members’ financial wellbeing—today and into the future.