INSIDE NATIONWIDE'S CLOUD MODERNISATION AND AI TRANSFORMATION

Nationwide is in the middle of a wide-ranging digital overhaul, rebuilding its cloud infrastructure, bringing its data together in one place and rolling out AI across the business. The goal is twofold: sharpen the service members receive today while preparing the ground for a more autonomous, agent-driven future.

As the world's largest building society, Nationwide serves 19 million members through 605 branches. It has already moved 15 million customers off its legacy core banking system, retired a customer data platform that had been running for 45 years, and is now gearing up to fold in five million Virgin Money accounts.

The scale of the change becomes clear when you look back only three years, when the organisation was working across 19 separate data stores. Those systems have since been consolidated onto Microsoft Azure and Azure Databricks, creating a single, unified data environment that the whole society can draw on.

According to Sri Kanisapakkam, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, the aim was one platform serving all of the society's data from a single place, on one technology, in the cloud.

Pulling structured database records together with unstructured documents and notes gives AI systems the full context they need to produce accurate, reliable results. As Sri puts it, AI is not magic, and it can only be trusted once the underlying data is trusted first.

To make the most of this new architecture, Nationwide introduced an internal tool called 'Talk to Data', initially for around 80 senior executives. It lets leaders interrogate complex enterprise data instantly using plain, natural language rather than technical queries.

Chief Technology Officer Paul Ballard says AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape how people work, but only if the foundations are right. He points to the society's ongoing work modernising its platform, shifting to the cloud, strengthening its data capabilities and giving colleagues the skills to use AI with confidence, all of which allows the business to move faster and deliver benefits for customers and staff alike.

KEY FACTS

15 million customers have been migrated off legacy core banking infrastructure.

A 45-year-old data system has been replaced with a unified, cloud-native environment.

19 separate data stores have been consolidated onto a single Microsoft Azure platform.

Around 2,500 software engineers are using GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI for code generation.

DRIVING EVERYDAY PRODUCTIVITY WITH MICROSOFT COPILOT

Adoption is spreading quickly across the workforce. Nationwide's 1,000-strong finance team was one of the first joint functions across Nationwide and Virgin Money to take up Microsoft 365 Copilot, using it to speed up drafting, generate meeting summaries and pull out action items.

A recent internal survey found that 46% of finance staff use Copilot every day, with a further 36% turning to it several times a week. Early adopters report faster drafting, quicker turnaround on routine work and more consistency across written output.

Looking ahead, the society is moving beyond standard productivity assistants towards fully agentic AI. Alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot for everyday tasks and GitHub Copilot with Azure OpenAI for engineers, Nationwide is building targeted domain agents, including knowledge assistants for frontline teams, tooling for software architects, and specialised workflow agents for anti-money laundering, customer due diligence and mortgage advice.

Ballard describes modernising a banking platform of this scale as significant but essential. By moving data to the cloud and embedding AI across the organisation, he says the society is building one of the most modern technology platforms in UK financial services: more resilient, more agile and better placed to meet customers' changing needs, with investment that lets it adopt new capabilities safely and at scale.

KEY TECHNOLOGY AND INTEGRATION PARTNERS

Microsoft provides the core cloud and AI infrastructure behind the transformation. Through Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, Nationwide has unified its data environment, streamlined workflows for more than 1,000 finance employees and enabled 2,500 engineers to build, test and deploy generative AI applications safely and at scale.

Virgin Money marks a key milestone in scaling the society's digital footprint. Following the acquisition, Nationwide is integrating five million Virgin Money accounts and bringing operational teams onto shared platforms to keep service consistent across all 19 million combined members.