West Brom Building Society is embarking on a three-stage project to build the digital capabilities its customers want.
The organisation, which offers mortgages and savings products to about 500,000 people, will retain its 34 branches, but said customers are showing a preference for more choice in how they engage with it.
The five-year project will see the 175-year-old company move from a “monolithic, self-hosted and predominantly batch system” to enabling customers to transact in real time, according to Martin Boyle, the building society’s chief operating officer.
West Brom Building Society will migrate its savings accounts from Unisys Financial Services System (UFSS), which has been in operation for over a decade, to a cloud-native platform from fintech firm 10x. UFSS will remain its core mortgage platform.
Boyle told Computer Weekly: “Increasingly, our customers are telling us they’d like to have the convenience and choice of digital technologies to engage with us, and an app in particular.”
He added: “We’re committed to maintaining our presence on the high street in the region through our 34 branches, however, new and existing customers are showing a preference for channel choice, hence our need to invest in digital capability.”
After carrying out an “extensive search” of the market, the building society chose 10x for the savings platform, partly due to it being cloud native and able to integrate with Salesforce.
It was also attracted to a 10x framework for front-end development from Deloitte, known as Converge.
“After a very comprehensive RFP [request for proposal] process, we settled on the Deloitte digital front-end framework, Converge, with a core ledger from 10x and a number of ancillary systems for elements of the ecosystem.”
An app for that
An iOS and Android mobile savings app will be created under the project, offering full account opening and operation in real time, along with web-based services.
“The core ledger platform is fully real time and deployed in the cloud, such that much of the batch processing we perform today will be replaced, leading to us being able to meet more of our members’ needs straight away,” said Boyle.
The new platform will allow the organisation to plug in other services using application programming interface (API) gateways, which will enable it to more easily adopt new capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI).
The organisation has about 200 IT staff and will work with Deloitte, its “lead service integrator”, to build the new offerings and run them as a managed service.
More than 100 people will be deployed on the programme at its peak, to build and integrate the digital front-end, core ledger from 10x and an eco-system of enterprise systems.
The programme is split into three 18-month phases.
The “first transition state”, as Boyle described it, involves the build and launch of the savings app across iOS and Android, and the migration of 30,000 customers from an outsourced relationship onto the new in-house platform.
The second transition state will migrate all remaining savings customers – about 400,000 – from the Unisys platform onto 10x.
The final state will involve deploying a new mortgage sales and originations platform. This will mean both brokers and retail customers can open accounts on the new core ledger.