Nationwide Building Society in retail payments tech revamp with Form3 and Accenture
UK-based Nationwide Building Society is on a digital payments infrastructure renovation journey with Form3 and Accenture.
Nationwide Building Society in major paytech revamp with Form3 and Accenture. Image source: Nationwide
Nationwide – the world’s largest building society – is an investor in Form3, and also announced a cloud-based payments project with the paytech firm in mid-2021.
Through a series of phases, which launched in 2022, Nationwide will migrate all types of retail payments from an on-premise platform to the Form3 cloud.
Based on an account-to-account (A2A) platform, the Form3 solution connects Nationwide to UK payments schemes such as Faster Payments and BACS.
The move will also enable the building society to meet regulatory changes, such as ISO 20022, the vendor adds.
Consulting firm Accenture, which has been working with Nationwide for a decade, was selected as the strategic delivery partner for the payments modernisation programme.
“We’ve seen massive growth in cashless payments in the UK, with Nationwide processing around 450 million retail transactions each year,” comments Otto Benz, payments director at Nationwide.
“We needed a solution that will evolve alongside our business, facilitating an increasing volume of payments whilst meeting the expectations of our customers.
“This project, in collaboration with Form3 and Accenture, is a major step in simplifying and strengthening our payments processing.”
Sulabh Agarwal, global payments lead at Accenture, describes the initiative as “an excellent example of a traditional financial institution embracing next-generation payments and reinventing customer experiences at speed and scale – supporting future growth, continuous innovation and industry relevance”.
Michael Mueller, Form3 CEO, assures Nationwide will migrate to the new platform “without impacting service delivery”.
Nationwide’s history dates back to the 1880s. Over the centuries, it has grown via an amalgamation of around 250 different building societies to become a UK retail banking heavyweight, with 15 million customers and 18,000 employees.
Form3 was founded in 2016 and is based in the UK. At the end of last year, it secured a €23 million venture debt facility from Atempo Growth.
Its clients include UK-based Lloyds Banking Group; European banks Aion, LHV, and N26; and fintechs Square, Ebury, and Ziglu. It claims its payments platform powers around 10% of all UK Faster Payments, equating to around 500 million transactions a year – approximately £175 billion.
