Nivo Sponsors Building Society Sector Analysis

We’re proud to have been involved in this review of the strategic landscape for building societies by Whitecap Consulting in partnership with the Building Societies Association (BSA), including a focus on how mutuality, regionality and technology can help create customer value and differentiation.

The report included a key theme that continued investment in a digitally enabled future is necessary to support customer engagement, distribution and operating efficiency.

Here is our take on three themes from the report which resonate with our experiences of helping financial services clients, and the priorities which inform how we develop our Nivo service.

First up, was the appetite to digitise in order to keep up with customer expectations. We hear this all the time in our client’s problem statements: “I’m worried about being hard to work with”, “We’re losing business because things take too long”, “There’s far too much paper, email and phone”. This theme comes through clearly in the report and resonates with our typical clients’ aspirations to be easy to do business with, to have a presence on people’s smartphones as an app, and to be perceived as modern and innovative.

Linked to this, is a theme around how to digitise. Specifically, to balance the efficiencies available through automation with the need to engage with a human touch, the flexibility to deal with niche cases, and the importance of maintaining a relationship focused approach. The importance to Building Societies of achieving this balance to differentiate from more ‘cold, faceless’ web portal solutions offered by mainstream providers is high and aligned to broader sector themes beyond technology: to stand out by being more personal, relevant, engaging and with a modern focus on social purpose.

Third, there’s a struggle with resource availability and expertise traditionally required to deliver new technology projects, exacerbated by the prevalence of legacy systems. As such, there are opportunities for solutions which can be implemented quickly, at low risk, cost effectively, without a dependency on legacy integrations, alongside a mindset shift away from complex IT transformation programmes, towards agile delivery, and rapid demonstration of benefits realisation.

We’re looking forward to working more with the Whitecap Consulting team to follow up on these themes with more content and roundtable activities, and excited about how we can help address these themes.

Here’s a link to the report in full:

https://www.whitecapconsulting.co.uk/articles/new-report-highlights-strong-sources-of-differentiation-for-the-building-society-sector/