YBS
both book growth and yield performance . It is also highly competitive now on digital . Morris believes that there are other financial institutions who could learn from this focused strategy .
Ramping up digital transformation When you think about digital transformation , you tend to think about the process of replatforming and the multiple legacy systems that often hold firms back . That is one of the key tenets of digital transformation after all . But , as with any sizeable undertaking within a business , the most important thing to get right from the outset is strategy . It can be a challenge to get everybody within a business subscribed to a digital transformation – it requires a huge cultural shift – but it can also be difficult to get all your objectives aligned .
When Director of Business Transformation Ben Sampson joined the business , YBS had an ageing legacy platform powering its websites ; it didn ’ t have a consumer app ; and the percentage of customers signing up through digital was somewhere between 15 % and 20 %.
It ’ s not an atypical hangover for a building society to have ; indeed , according to research from the Building Societies Association published in 2021 , twothirds of building societies identify digital transformation as the main challenge facing the sector in the next five years .
“ We had a good physical business model , good branches ,” Sampson says . “ But we were really lagging behind on both the technology front and the digital commerce performance front .”
First , Yorkshire Building Society established a single vision and ambition organisation-wide that everybody was aligned to . Digital transformation has proven to be a considerable , long-term investment for the business – the single biggest programme of work that YBS has ever done , as Sampson puts it . “ That ’ s as significant as the replatforming for me ,” he says . “ A business that gets unified behind that single goal , which can then lead to all the important elements of conditions for success such as the ability to have razor-sharp prioritisation discussions . They ’ re not possible if you ’ ve got different viewpoints , because it just becomes an argument .”
YBS built and launched its first native apps for iOS and Android , getting into the pockets of its customers for the first time . The demand has always been there : research shows that a majority of UK banking customers want their banks to offer
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