Nationwide Building Society has announced a six-year, £300m investment programme to upgrade its High Street outlets and its online and telephone banking services.

The company has outlined a range of plans, including the installation of internet terminals in branches for customers to conduct transactions online, as well as customer management systems.

During the first two years of the project, 100 branches will undergo wide-ranging improvements and system updates, and a further 85 branches and agencies will be refurbished.

'While others are taking their service proposition abroad, or encouraging people to use the internet instead of branches, we are investing in High Streets across the country and in our UK call centres,' said Nationwide chief executive Philip Williamson at the company's annual general meeting in Birmingham.

Many UK banks are re-investing in branch technology after years of encouraging customers online.

'All the banks are doing the same thing,' Barclays chief technology officer Kevin Lloyd told Computing.

Barclays is two-thirds of the way through a major branch rejuvenation programme, which will take up a large part of the company's annual £300m strategic investment spending.

The bank has been rolling out new networks, infrastructure and applications across more than 2,000 branches.

'We're making big scale infrastructure investments around the branch and contact centres, which all require infrastructure renewal,' said Lloyd.

'Over a four-year period we will put £1.2bn into business change investment and a good proportion of that is the infrastructure renewal programme.'

Barclays expects to complete the rollout by the fourth quarter of next year.

'There are bits that are complete and bits that are nearing completion but the whole proposition won't land in its entirety until late 2005,' said Lloyd.

The rest of the programme will focus on additional operational efficiencies.

'We've been doing "more for the same", and the requirement now is "more for less", so we've got a lot of work going on in tightening up and taking out complexity,' he said.