In 2022, we joined forces with Nationwide Building Society to help enhance user experience for its 16 million members. Since then, we've been working collaboratively to transform the society's platform and data strategy, to enable a seamless member experience across all touchpoints.
While there's still some big milestones ahead, we've also come a long way, both in terms of the project and as a collaborative team. We sat down with Nationwide's Chief Product Owner (Customer Data), Sean Esmonde, to reflect on our journey to date, and what the team have learned working with AND.
AND: Set the scene, what brought you to work with AND?
SE: We wanted to transform the way we manage and protect our customer data, and harness it in the right way to improve customer experience and deliver value. To make that happen, we needed to modernise the data products and platforms we were using. AND Digital have been key in accelerating the development of our data products, whilst simultaneously supporting our colleagues and building our in-house capability.
AND: What processes/platforms have been introduced or changed as a result of working together?
SE: Together, we have built and deployed a new platform to manage customer preferences and attributes. We’ve also modernised our customer information system and made crucial changes to our ways of working. Agile has enabled us to move to a CI/CD [continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment] development cycle.
AND: Have you hit any ‘bumps in the road’ during the project?
SE: As with most data and IT transformations, bumps in the road have been continuous! A number of things we’ve worked on have been new ground for some of the Nationwide team; such as building a real-time Kafka event hub, or designing and developing a set of customer-centric APIs to manage data more effectively.
When you’re in new territory there will always be challenges and bumps in the road, but having AND embedded across our product teams - and having immediate access to the amazing skills and knowledge they bring to the table - means that problem solving has been so much quicker.
AND are invested in the growth and development of our Nationwide team, embedding their people as part of our team to work and learn side by side - that’s been a major part of this project’s success.
You can read more about the project here.
