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Nationwide Building Society logoNationwide Building Society

Financial services provider streamlines customer communication and accelerates content creation for millions of members across the UK with OpenText

Nationwide Building Society logo

About Nationwide Building Society

With 178 years of history in the UK market, Nationwide Building Society provides financial services to millions of members across the country, including personal banking, mortgages, insurance and more.

  • Founded:
    1846
  • Branches:
    605
  • Members:
    16 million

Summary

Challenges

  • Achieve rapid compliance with new regulations around customer communications from the UK Financial Conduct Authority.
  • Enable faster creation of tailored print communications.

Solution

  • Selected a proven customer communication management solution.
  • Engaged expert support from OpenText Professional Services.
  • Migrated with zero disruption for end users.

Results

  • performance-gauge Accelerated content workflows by 83%
  • performance-cog Reduced time to create templates from 12 to two weeks
  • business-contact Enabled personalized, omnichannel communications

Challenges

  • Drive effective engagement with millions of building society members
  • Ensure compliance with stringent new regulations around customer communications
  • Creating new communication templates took up to 12 weeks

Headquartered in Swindon, England, Nationwide Building Society offers retail banking, insurance and other financial services to more than 16 million members across the UK. As a member-owned organization, Nationwide strives to provide the best value in banking.

Amitesh Mishra, CIO for customer experience platforms at Nationwide, confirmed, “Because we’re not a bank, we don't have shareholders. This means we can invest everything back into our members—helping to improve their lives and financial wellbeing.”

As part of its commitment to service excellence, Nationwide is always looking for better ways to engage with its members. Following the publication of the Consumer Duty regulation by the UK Financial Conduct Authority, the ability to deliver clear, timely communications has now become a regulatory requirement.

“There are many important aspects to the Consumer Duty regulation,” continued Mishra. “From a communication perspective, we need to ensure that we are providing clear information to customers about the products we offer and the choices available to them. It’s also crucial that this information is accessible to all—for example, through the use of formats such as Braille and large print.”

In the past, Nationwide worked with a third-party provider to create, manage and distribute communications to its millions of members across the UK. However, this approach made it difficult for the organization to make changes to customer communications.

“We wanted to deliver more personalized, relevant, and consistent experiences to our customers on their channel of choice,” said Mishra, “So, we decided to completely transform our approach to communications and personalization.”

City of London Tower Bridge

In the past, it took as long as 12 weeks to create a new communications template—but with Exstream, we’ve cut that down to just two weeks.

Amitesh Mishra
CIO for Customer Experience Platforms, Nationwide

Solution

Working with OpenText Professional Services, Nationwide moved its print communications to OpenText Exstream: a secure, cost-effective and agile customer communication management platform.

Products deployed

Selecting a proven customer communication management solution

By selecting Exstream as its new customer communication management platform, Nationwide was confident that it could accelerate and enhance its ability to deliver tailored print communications that comply with the new Consumer Duty requirements.

“I implemented Exstream in a previous role at another large bank, so I knew first-hand that the solution would be easy to implement and deliver the personalization capabilities we wanted,” recalled Mishra. “The OpenText solution also offers a very user-friendly content authoring experience, which means that you don’t need to be a technical expert to build high-quality communications.”

Engaged expert support from OpenText Professional Services

To unlock the benefits of Exstream rapidly, Nationwide engaged experts from OpenText Professional Services to provide support throughout the implementation process.

“Our main goal was to quickly migrate our print communications to the new solution without any disruption to our member communications during the process,” said Mishra. “OpenText Professional Services really helped us to hit the ground running—the support they provided was fantastic. The team understood our problem statements very quickly. With their assistance, we migrated even our most complex document templates to the new platform ahead of our go-live target.”

Migrating with zero disruption for end users

Through its partnership with OpenText, Nationwide achieved its goal of a seamless migration to the new solution. Deployed in the Microsoft Azure cloud, Exstream enables the building society to engage with its members more effectively than ever.

“We stood up the entire OpenText solution in the cloud and onboarded around 95% of our mission-critical communications within just eight weeks—an outstanding achievement,” commented Mishra. “As a result, we successfully avoided any downstream impact on customers while enhancing our ability to deliver compelling and compliant communications.”

Two people discussing a project

Ultimately, the OpenText solution will help us reduce the amount of paper we use and shrink our carbon footprint.

Amitesh Mishra
CIO for Customer Experience Platforms, Nationwide

Results

Today, Nationwide uses Exstream to produce 133 million print communications for 16 million customers each year, including mission-critical documents across all the building society’s product lines.

Accelerating content workflows by 83%

By bringing its customer communications in house with Exstream, Nationwide can meet and exceed its regulatory requirements while delighting its millions of members with relevant and timely communications.

“In the past, it took as long as 12 weeks to create a new communications template—but with Exstream, we’ve cut that down to just two weeks,” said Mishra. “As well as accelerating our content workflows by 83%, the OpenText solution enables our users to create communications without support from IT. We’re even using Exstream to accelerate our internal print communications; it’s transformed our approach from end to end.”

Supporting sustainability objectives

Nationwide is committed to delivering environmentally sustainable operations, including a long-term objective to move to paperless operations. With support for all communication types and digital channels, Exstream will help the building society on its sustainability journey.

Mishra confirmed, “We currently produce around 133 million items of print every year. Because we produce these communications with Exstream, we can seamlessly switch our delivery channel from paper to digital as soon as customers update their delivery preferences. Ultimately, the OpenText solution will help us reduce the amount of paper we use and shrink our carbon footprint.”

Enabling personalized, omnichannel communications

With Exstream at the heart of its customer communication management strategy, Nationwide is poised to deliver hyper-personalized communications on each member’s preferred channel.

“We want to personalize our outreach based on a 360-degree view of each customer’s needs and preferences,” explained Mishra. “For example, if a customer comes to our website looking for a loan, we want to be able to rapidly identify them as an existing customer and surface a personalized offer via their Nationwide mobile app within seconds. With Exstream, we will be able to deliver real-time communications on every channel.”

Preparing for an AI-enabled future

Nationwide is now building on its partnership with OpenText to further refine its approach to customer communications. The building society plans to integrate Exstream with OpenText Digital Asset Management to centralize and standardize its content assets, and to explore the potential of generative AI to streamline the content creation process.

“With OpenText as our content management partner, we are in an excellent position to drive even closer and more personalized engagement with our members,” concluded Mishra.

Blog

Person looking at phone

Nationwide Building Society gives member communications the personal touch

Guest author Amitesh Mishra, CIO for Customer Experience Platforms, explains how the organization accelerated its content workflows by 83% with OpenText™ Exstream.

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