FAQ
Publicis Sapient worked with Nationwide Building Society to strengthen the digital and technology foundations behind its banking and mortgage services. The work included a later-life lending platform for people over 55, migration of key digital journeys to Nationwide’s enterprise cloud platform and a modern data layer designed to keep critical services available across channels.
What did Publicis Sapient help Nationwide Building Society build?
Publicis Sapient helped Nationwide Building Society build several connected capabilities. These included the Later Life Lending digital platform, migration of key digital journeys to Nationwide’s Cloud Center of Excellence and a modern data layer called Speed Layer. Together, these efforts supported new mortgage propositions, stronger resilience and faster delivery of digital services.
What business challenges was Nationwide trying to solve?
Nationwide was trying to solve for resilience, speed and legacy complexity. Its growth in digital channels was putting more pressure on traditional systems, while key applications and journeys needed a faster, more secure and more reusable foundation. Nationwide also wanted to bring new products and services to market more quickly without compromising service continuity.
What is Nationwide’s Later Life Lending suite?
Nationwide’s Later Life Lending suite is a set of mortgage options designed for people over 55. Publicis Sapient describes it as a first-of-its-kind service that gave members a simpler digital way to understand their choices while keeping specialist advice within reach. The suite includes Retirement Capital and Interest, Retirement Interest Only and Lifetime products.
Who is the Later Life Lending suite for?
The Later Life Lending suite is for people aged 55 and over. The source material explains that this group had limited borrowing options despite wanting ways to access the value in their homes. Nationwide created the proposition to better serve changing needs later in life.
What problem was Nationwide solving with Later Life Lending?
Nationwide was addressing a gap in borrowing options for later-life customers. The source material says people over 55 may want funds for home improvements, debt consolidation, helping loved ones or lifestyle goals, but often have few suitable choices. Nationwide wanted to make those options clearer and easier to access.
How does the Later Life Lending experience work?
The Later Life Lending experience combines digital access with human guidance. Publicis Sapient built a platform that gives mortgage consultants access to an online application showing a holistic view of each member’s situation and available options. That allows Nationwide to provide advice based on the member’s circumstances while keeping the journey digitally convenient.
What mortgage products does the Later Life Lending platform support?
The platform supports three later-life mortgage products. These are Retirement Capital and Interest, Retirement Interest Only and Lifetime. Publicis Sapient says the platform was built to execute and scale all three propositions through a single digital solution.
What made the Later Life Lending platform different?
The Later Life Lending platform was designed to create a single process across multiple repayment types. Publicis Sapient says the suite was described as a benchmark for the industry and ahead of the market in the way it unified the process. It also balanced digital convenience with specialist advice rather than relying on a purely self-service journey.
What technology underpinned the Later Life Lending platform?
The Later Life Lending platform was underpinned by an event-driven architecture. Publicis Sapient says this was the first event-driven architecture at Nationwide and that it supported reliability, resilience, availability and agility. Back-office processes were also automated so business operations teams could handle more cases.
How long did it take to build the Later Life Lending platform?
Publicis Sapient says it built the Later Life Lending platform in 10 months. The source presents this as a fast delivery timeline for a complex mortgage proposition. Nationwide also described the outcome as delivered in record-breaking time.
What results did Later Life Lending achieve?
Later Life Lending generated substantial customer demand and mortgage completions. Publicis Sapient reports around 32,000 inquiries, 7,686 mortgage applications and 5,749 mortgage completions. The platform also opened a new revenue stream for Nationwide and helped customers make significant, informed financial decisions.
Why was cloud modernization important to Nationwide?
Cloud modernization gave Nationwide a stronger foundation for digital change. Publicis Sapient helped migrate key Engage and Originate journeys to Nationwide’s Cloud Center of Excellence so the organization could bring new products and services to market more quickly. The goal was to improve customer experience while reducing the time and cost required to build and deploy new journeys.
What results came from Nationwide’s cloud migration work?
The cloud migration was completed with zero downtime and a 50% faster migration timeline. Publicis Sapient says this allowed Nationwide to continue serving customers without disruption while moving more quickly to the new platform. The work also created reusable components, onboarding templates, documentation, governance models and shared services for future teams.
What is NDAP in Nationwide’s technology foundation?
NDAP is the Nationwide Digital Accelerator Platform. Publicis Sapient describes it as a cloud-native, containerized, elastic, resilient and secure infrastructure powered by Amazon Web Services. It was built around code-first, automation-first and security-first principles to provide a more consistent and repeatable environment for digital services.
What technologies were mentioned in Nationwide’s cloud platform?
Nationwide’s cloud platform was built on AWS and integrated with shared services and security controls. The source material specifically mentions AWS CloudFront, EC2, RDS, EKS, WAF and CloudTrail, along with Terraform and Helm. These technologies supported a consistent and repeatable infrastructure model.
How did Publicis Sapient improve Nationwide’s data resilience and service availability?
Publicis Sapient improved resilience by developing Speed Layer for Nationwide. Speed Layer is a near real-time cache built on a modern technology stack that captures changes from legacy systems of record using change data capture and streaming technologies. It makes important data available to applications through microservices and APIs so digital channels can operate more reliably.
What is Speed Layer and how does it work?
Speed Layer is a modern data layer designed to store and structure important data for digital channels. It captures updates from legacy systems in real time, stores that data in a highly scalable layer structured for consumption and exposes it through microservices and APIs. This gives multiple applications access to current information without tightly coupling every service to core systems.
What measurable impact did Speed Layer deliver?
Speed Layer delivered performance, resilience and cost benefits. Publicis Sapient reports microservices response times of 7 milliseconds, daily reconciliation of around 300 million records in less than 45 minutes and more than 95% automated coverage in test scenarios. The work also contributed to around £4 million in infrastructure savings.
How did these modernization efforts help Nationwide launch new products more effectively?
These modernization efforts created a reusable foundation for future services. Publicis Sapient links cloud-native infrastructure, event-driven architecture, APIs, microservices, automation and resilient data services to Nationwide’s ability to launch customer-facing products with greater speed and control. In the source material, product innovation was enabled by modernization of the underlying platform.
What should buyers take away from this Nationwide example?
The main takeaway is that better digital financial services depend on modern foundations as much as front-end experience. The source material shows how cloud platforms, reusable components, event-driven integration, resilient data access and automation can help support new products, stronger continuity and faster delivery. For institutions that need both digital convenience and operational resilience, the technology operating model is part of the proposition.