Nottingham Building Society says it has reduced the time needed to prepare customer interest-rate change communications from around two weeks to less than 15 minutes after consolidating data that had previously been spread across separate systems.
The mutual has deployed a Microsoft Fabric data platform built with AND Digital over a 12-week period. Customer information held across systems including Salesforce and Sopra Banking Software can now be brought together without the same reliance on manual spreadsheet reconciliation.
The previous process could also leave staff working with conflicting records and unreliable contact details before communications were issued. Bringing those records into a common data environment is intended to give employees a more consistent view of customers when savings or mortgage rates change.
Speed is particularly relevant when a rate decision affects large groups of customers at once. The Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty requires financial services companies to support good customer outcomes and provide communications that customers can understand. Faster preparation does not change those obligations, but it reduces the amount of time spent reconciling information before customers can be contacted.
The platform is also intended to improve Nottingham’s ability to identify vulnerable customers and assess whether products are delivering fair value. Both depend on reliable information being available across customer relationships rather than remaining divided between operational systems.
The project sits within a broader data programme at the building society. Nottingham is building an enterprise platform around Microsoft Fabric and Azure to support analytics, regulatory reporting and other data-intensive functions. Its current recruitment for the programme includes work on Salesforce, Sopra Banking Services, CACI and Experian integrations, alongside explicit responsibility for data quality, security, lineage and governance.
That wider architecture gives the rate-change process significance beyond the time saved on one task. Consolidating data can support faster decisions, but it also creates a greater need for controls over how information is ingested, reconciled, accessed and reused. In a regulated lender, those governance requirements sit alongside the productivity case for automation.
Nottingham also expects the platform to support future mortgage decision-making. Development work is intended to give underwriters access to a broader view of individual cases and support more flexible assessment of borrowers whose circumstances do not fit conventional scoring models.
The building society is among the first organisations admitted to the joint FCA and Prudential Regulation Authority Scale-up Unit, which was established to provide tailored regulatory support to growing banks and building societies. Nottingham joined Allica Bank, ClearBank, Monument Bank, OakNorth Bank and Zopa Bank in the first cohort announced in February.
That places its technology programme within a wider growth agenda as well as an efficiency drive. Improvements to data infrastructure have to support faster product development and customer decisions without weakening controls around affordability, conduct or information management.
The most immediate result is measurable. Work that previously took about two weeks to prepare can now be completed in minutes. The larger test will be whether the same data foundation can produce comparable improvements in underwriting, reporting and member service as Nottingham extends it into more complex processes.
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