Nationwide’s tech investment laid the foundation for the bank’s current account infrastructure and today, it supports more than 10 million live current accounts on banking solutions from SAP.
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Nationwide Building Society, the British financial leader, is a mutual organization, meaning it’s owned by its members or customers, rather than shareholders. This structure allows Nationwide to prioritize the needs and interests of its members in its operations and decision-making.
“Unlike other banks, we are owned by everyone who banks, saves or has a mortgage with us,” said Otto Benz, Payments Director at Nationwide Building Society. He was speaking at the recent SAP and SAP Fioneer Forum for Financial Services event presented by TAC Insights in Munich. “This means we can always focus on what’s best for them. It’s our fundamental difference and what makes us a good way to bank.”
Benz described the bank’s transformational journey as both complex and essential, requiring a balancing act between enabling innovation and maintaining resilience as its core platforms are transformed.
Benz wears two hats at Nationwide: one leading the payments agenda and the other overseeing customer technology. This includes core banking and savings platforms, mortgage platforms, payments infrastructure, and most of the non-digital channels—all underpinned by SAP and solutions from the SAP Fioneer partnership.
A huge volume
The largest mutual building society in the United Kingdom, the bank manages over £367 billion in assets, serving around 16 million customers with over 23 million retail accounts.
“We’re responsible for about 11% of the UK’s consumer banking market, meaning a significant portion of the country relies on us to get paid, manage their savings, and make everyday purchases,” said Benz.
Payments, understandably, are a huge focus. Each year, the bank processes over 4 billion payment transactions, including:
- 2.5 billion card payments
- Half a billion real-time Faster Payments
- Another half a billion in batch payments (direct debits, salary credits, and so on)
- High-value CHAPS transactions
- ATM, check, and international payments
At peak, the bank handles around 100 payments per second. With those volumes, stability isn’t optional—it’s mission-critical.
The bank’s transformation story with SAP began in 2005. Originally estimated at £100 million ($135 million), the first wave of implementation ended up costing five times as much over five years. But that investment laid the foundation for the bank’s current account infrastructure—today, it supports more than 10 million live current accounts on banking solutions from SAP.
The savings side has been a more gradual transition.
“We’ve spent the past 15 years migrating roughly 14 million legacy savings accounts, with half now moved. Our CIO for Retail assures me the rest will be done ‘by Christmas’—though she didn’t specify which one,” said Benz with a chuckle.
The complexity of change
Benz explained that the team had inherited legacy payments platforms built on aging Microsoft BizTalk infrastructure. Though surprisingly capable, it was originally designed for much lower volumes. Fast forward to today, and it was buckling under pressure, particularly as virtualization introduced instability.
Its real-time Faster Payments platform has been replaced with a cloud-native solution and batch processing is being replaced with the Payment Central solution from SAP Fioneer. The solution is designed to meet today’s resiliency standards, including 99.99% uptime, high availability, and faster releases. However, things rarely go according to plan. Sometimes, releases are late; pressure is high. The stakes are enormous.
To top it off, the bank is also mid-way through migrating its more than 30 million customer records from legacy systems to SAP Business Technology Platform while simultaneously planning for the integration of customers from its recent acquisition of Virgin Money—bringing in millions more accounts.
“It’s tempting to think of change as linear,” said Benz. “In reality, it’s like rewiring a house under strict building regulations while people are still living in it. Every change, however small, must be carefully orchestrated around ongoing customer needs and system uptime.”
The bank is moving to real-time, cloud-native platforms while also preparing payments, customer records, and eventually Virgin Money’s systems for full integration. “All this needs to happen with minimal outages, zero data loss, and full compliance with regulators who can be skeptical of anything cloud-based,” said Benz.
Lessons in resilience
Resilience versus innovation is a balancing act. Resilience demands stable, recoverable systems and slow, deliberate changes. Innovation demands fast delivery, fail-fast mindsets, and rapid iteration.
In banking, especially retail, the margin for error is razor thin. Customers expect their payments to go through instantly—and if benefits don’t hit accounts at 12:30 a.m., the bank can be sure of a headline in The Sun by breakfast.
After 20 years, its SAP environment is heavily customized. Middleware sprawl, layered integrations, and homegrown mini subledgers were a barrier to adopting newer SAP solution capabilities—such as financial products subledger (FPSL) or modern APIs. There’s also a lack of business appetite to invest in technical upgrades that don’t show direct value. Convincing finance teams to sponsor a major overhaul requires a compelling ROI story—which isn’t easy to tell when the benefits are long-term resilience rather than immediate features.
Benz outlined the major action items for the next year:
- Develop people and partnerships, because talent and expertise in these platforms are scarce
- Unwind decades of customization and go back to a clean core—especially on new platforms such as Payment Central. Resist customization wherever possible.
- Finalize the transition of legacy systems, consolidating around SAP solutions where it makes sense, and bringing Virgin Money into a streamlined, modern stack for better focus, less cost, and better resilience.
Benz concluded by saying that in banking, no one praises the system that just works. “For us, the best payments platform is the one no one notices,” he said. “If we get to a place where customers never think about us—because their money just arrives, their app just works, and their savings just grow—then we’ve done our job right.”