Rebooting building societies for success in the digital age

What image do the words “building society” bring to mind?

Respectable Victorian gentlemen with serious beards, stovepipe hats and gold watch chains? Stiff clerks hunched over high desks in dusty offices, scribbling with quill pens in leather-bound ledgers?

Our vibrant 2022 reality is utterly unlike this sepia-tinted view of a Dickensian white-collar workplace, although we’re proud still to share our founders’ values such as thrift, hard work and innovation.

Like them, we too are living in a period of rapid technological change with huge implications for how we all live our lives.

So as the Society has always done, we keep moving with the times, whether that’s harnessing AI for managing our systems and credit analytics, using Azure’s public cloud to deliver modern digital solutions, or upgrading our data centres to increase security and resilience for the future.

Significant and ongoing investment in our people and capabilities related to automated build, test, release and deploy is speeding up delivery, such as helping us to achieve best in class mortgage origination – we’ve been able to cut approvals for some types of mortgages from days to hours and have just set a new record with the first sub one-minute application to offer for a mortgage.

Our agile and product-based delivery model is bringing forward improvements at pace, all towards the aim of making us slicker, quicker and easier to do business with.

It’s never been a more exciting time to be working in technology at the Society, as we undergo a massive tech and digital transformation to make sure we’re fit for the future. The size of our ambition – and the breadth of opportunities this creates - is shown by the scale of our recruitment. Almost one in five of all our colleagues is now a digital or technology specialist.

After dispersed working through the height of the pandemic, we’re enjoying being able to collaborate in person at our environmentally friendly head office, making good use of the flexible, modern space which supports our new hybrid working patterns. Not for nothing were we crowned best financial services company to work for by Best Companies.

We’ve thrived since our creation in 1875 by embracing change to ensure we stay competitive, responsive and relevant for our hundreds of thousands of members nationally.

And while our simple, low-risk business model remains the same – money in from savers, money out to mortgage borrowers – it’s new talent and technology which are helping us to successfully and securely bring home ownership within reach for even more people.

So we’ll continue to seek out and adopt the latest ideas and methods, led and developed by our skilled and forward-looking colleagues.

With their love for novel problem-solving, I’m sure our Victorian forebears would approve.