Swansea case study

Swansea Building Society was founded almost a century ago, and their traditional mutual model sees them offering a comprehensive face to face service. When they decided to improve their digital offering, we worked with them to implement our Online Banking technology, and the results speak for themselves.

What challenges was Swansea facing in delivering high quality services to customers?

Swansea Building Society were keen to introduce online banking both to offer their customers more flexibility and to supplement their face-to-face offering with a digital channel to ensure they remained competitive.

Rather than detracting from their traditional model, they wanted to offer customers the opportunity to transact in the way that suits them best. Once it became clear that there was an appetite from customers, it was a question of finding the right tool to do the job.

Why was Mutual Vision the right software company to help?

Swansea turned to MV because of the simplicity of our Online Banking proposition: MV was able to help achieve a stress-free implementation with a total lack of complexity, which they confirmed by speaking to some of our other clients.

‘We were keen to work with an experienced provider of online banking solutions to deliver our digital savings platform. Being able to partner with an established player in the mutual sector, using a product that was already to go, was a very attractive proposition and made the implementation and solution lower risk and easier to control,’ explained Swansea’s Finance Director, Nathan Griffiths.

How has the platform been received?

Swansea have first focused on onboarding existing customers and embedding it within the society. They’ve had strong uptake rates and great feedback from customers; people have found online banking incredibly useful, especially over the last few months.

91% of customers to date have said they were satisfied with the platform, and Swansea have seen uptake even from customers of all ages and backgrounds.

‘The oldest customer to start using online banking so far is well into their 90s, so we’ve seen people we wouldn’t have expected to use it,’ says Chris Wright, IT Application Delivery Manager at Swansea.

‘When it comes to our satisfaction scores, the proof is in the pudding – it’s allowed us to offer a more comprehensive service and people are clearly very happy with it,’ he added.

How has the platform enabled Swansea to deliver the best service to its customers?

Being able to offer Swansea customers the ability to bank online has given Swansea Building Society another strength: their digital presence makes them more of a modern mutual and has made them more of an attractive prospect for younger customers especially.

Furthermore, giving existing customers to the option to transact without going into a branch has been of particular value over lockdown, and has allowed Swansea to serve their members well throughout, particularly those who are vulnerable.