CLOUD
Gary Delooze, CIO of the UK’s Nationwide, gives an honest and detailed insight into the building society’s migration to the Cloud – part of a £4.1billion IT investment that more than lived up to its promise during the pandemic Nationwide Building Society is in the process of re-platforming its digital banking and mortgage services to a multi-Cloud environment. It’s part of an ambitious journey that Britain’s biggest building society, the UK’s second-largest mortgage lender, set out on in 2008, to ensure it was primed for the next generation of digital innovation. As it progressed, it topped up the spend. In 2018, the organisation announced that it would be investing £4.1billion over the next five years to radically simplify its IT system, speed up development processes and improve the quality of the products and services it brings to market. Today, its Cloud Centre of Excellence teams are focussed on building Cloud landing zones using DevOps tool chains, and partnering with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft to bring an agile, multi-Cloud capability to the organisation. Projects include working with Microsoft to build new
websites and member services into Azure tenants; building new digital journeys and APIs, using microservices hosted in AWS containers; and creating multi-Cloud, containerised environments using RedHat OpenShift. In the words of the man leading those teams, it means they ‘get to work on some phenomenal projects that tackle properly thorny problems’. Moving to Cloud is a road that many of Nationwide’s contemporaries are on, as they seek to prevent their market share from more nimble competitors. CIO Gary Delooze explains: “One of our bigger challenges for the last few years has been how we can achieve the same level of agility as you would expect to see in a challenger bank, or in a typical technology organisation. “What Cloud gives us – with the automation and tooling that we’ve put in place – is the ability to create infrastructure as code, to deploy this very quickly and to therefore be able to stand up new solutions, capabilities and
services for our members – we’re talking minutes, not months. But where it’s really exploded for us is software-as-a-service. That variety of building blocks, services, platforms and environments that we can stand up really quickly has grown exponentially in the past few years, and has accelerated the journey to value massively. And, done right, we can deliver it all in a way that is far more resilient than typical, on-premise technology.” Exploiting the vast possibilities that new technology and Cloud adoption create for the benefit of Nationwide’s 15 million members doesn’t come without its challenges, however. “Financial services organisations are set up to manage risk, so the big challenge for us in adopting any new technology, whether it’s Cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), or anything else, is are we able to put sufficient controls in place? Are we able to manage the risks so we can protect our members and customers, and deliver the kind of services that they want us to?
AjourneytotheCloud
Team effort: Delooze says he’s ‘proud of how our tech teams have stepped up to the challenges of Cloud adoption’
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Issue 17 | TheFintechMagazine
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