Case Study: Swansea Building Society

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 MV Online Banking technology and the results speak for themselves.

The Challenge

Swansea Building Society was 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 the customer, 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 Mutual Vision because of the simplicity of the  MV Online Banking Proposition: Mutual Vision 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. “With limited IT resources in-house, we were never going to be able to develop an online banking solution ourselves. Being able to partner with an established player in the mutual sector, using a product that was ready to go, was an 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 has first focussed on onboarding existing members 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 year. 91% of members to date have said they were satisfied with the platform and Swansea have seen uptake even from members of all ages and backgrounds. “The oldest customer to start using online banking so far is well into their 90’s, so we’ve seen people we wouldn’t have expected to use it” said 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 delivered improved service to its members?

Being able to offer Swansea Building Society members the ability to bank online has given Swansea another strength: their digital presence makes them a modern mutual and has made them a more attractive prospect, especially to younger customers. Furthermore, giving existing members 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, especially those who are vulnerable.