“Fundamentally, I want to make things better,” says Nationwide’s Head of Customer Journey, Dan Wilson. “Early on in my career, I was always fascinated by processes – and often terrible processes – and was inspired to discover ways to make them simpler and more effective. Over time, this desire to make things better has evolved, but at the core of it all, I get up every day to do this job because I want to make things better for our customers – better products, tools and features that deliver more resilient services. I want to make sure our customers across the country continue to use modern, useful and trusted payment services.”
Setting the Payments Vision
Dan is passionate about payments and has played a vital role in promoting Nationwide’s voice across the UK payments industry. He says: “The publication of the National Payments Vision, and subsequent industry work drives much needed clarity on future payments infrastructure, regulatory oversight, Open Banking and even exploring the future of new digital assets”.
The Group’s strategic purpose – “Banking, but fairer, more rewarding and for the good of society” – means that Nationwide gives customers the option of paying how they prefer. “Customers want to be able to manage their money in multiple ways, whether that be accessing cash services within the branches, making a payment on their app or being able to walk into a branch and speak to a colleague”.
Modernising Payments at Nationwide
Nationwide’s vision is to deliver a scalable and resilient payments ecosystem that supports the ever-growing number of transactions each year, easier innovation and delivery of features. Thiscore modernisation effort is essential to underpin the Group’s “modern mutual” approach and provides a strong foundation for both the now and the future. It also allows flexibility for the Group to adapt to the changing payments industry, regulations and technologies.
Nationwide Building Society has a long history of innovation, from the early days of our internet banking and Open Banking, through to modern-day banking app and services. Underpinning all of this is payments. “Payments are essential to all of us,” says Dan. “Whether that be paying for groceries, a regular utilities bill or paying a friend: over time they have all become increasingly digitised. We are all making more payments than ever – our Faster Payment volumes have increased by almost 93% in the last 5 years. So, to keep up with this, Nationwide needs a modern and scalable infrastructure that is resilient and flexible.”
Nationwide’s work with Accenture and Form3 has delivered a cloud-native, ISO 20022-compliant payments platform. “Our platform is scaled to cope with billions of transactions annually and offers award-winning resilience,” continues Dan. “While there is more to do, we’re already processing 91.5% of our FPS traffic to our new system and are the UK’s first banking institution to run ‘Dual Cloud’. We have also commenced migrating some of our Bacs traffic to our new strategic platform, paving the way to migrate millions of regular payments for our customers to a new, secure and resilient platform. As ever, the success in these achievements is often that they go unnoticed.”