How Leeds Building Society's move to the cloud is supporting a mobile-first application development focus

Shifting Leeds Building Society's core banking platform to the cloud is just the start of a customer-focused, mobile-first revolution, CIO Tom Clark tells Computing

When Tom Clark arrived at the Leeds Building Society to take the newly created role of CIO two years ago, the decision had already been made to take its banking platform, provided by its rival Yorkshire Building Society, in-house in order to improve its responsiveness and agility - and then reversed.

Instead, in April 2015, Leeds Building Society completed a migration of that banking platform to HP's Helion cloud in a 10-year deal as part of a broader modernisation strategy.

"There had been a view that we ought to bring our banking platform in-house, but this was reversed and we decided to go with HP," says Leeds Building Society CIO Clark, who arrived at the organisation in mid-2013 from banking giant HSBC. The shift coincided with the acquisition of the banking platform code by HP as part of its strategy to offer "banking as a service" to mid-tier financial organisations across the UK, with the Leeds becoming the first customer.

The cloud migration was executed over one weekend in April following months of preparation, and the migration was planned in such a way that if there was any reason whatsoever to abort the shift, the organisation could do so without consequence, right up until 20 April. "We continued running on the Yorkshire system until we were ready," says Clark.

Changing channels

Part of the reason for the move, in addition to improving the organisation's agility and enabling it to hand off the running of a major part of its infrastructure to a specialist third-party, was the increasingly onerous burden of regulation in recent years, which ultimately comes down to IT to implement. These affect mid-tier banking organisations particularly acutely.

"It takes us to a much better place. One of the concerns from a financial services perspective is about resilience - the ability to recover from failures, for example. To move to a cloud solution that is designed to give you a high level of resilience is hugely attractive to us," says Clark. With expertise concentrated under HP, at a data centre not far from Leeds Building Society's Yorkshire HQ, it ought to be able to run it more smoothly.

On top of that, the financial services sector is also facing increased competition from a range of rivals. These don't just include banking start-ups, such as Metro Bank, or spin-outs, such as TSB, but also from non-traditional sources, such as PayPal in payments and peer-to-peer lending organisations like Zopa.

At the same time as migrating to the cloud, therefore, HP and Leeds Building Society will build a new customer relationship platform that will help the organisation to get a wider picture of customers and customer interactions - not just direct communications, but mobile, Twitter and other social media interactions, all the way through to formal transactions including account openings and loan applications.

Those interactions may start with a Tweet, and continue online via a browse of the company's website. From there, the customer may choose web chat with an adviser, before completing their desired business in-branch - and at each stage, the adviser will have full insight into the transaction from end-to-end. That, at least, is Clark's vision.

"We are looking at a number of off-the-shelf packages, to bring them together in a unique way. That's what will give us something special," says Clark. "It will be web and mobile... It's an omni-channel programme, so the idea is that whatever channel the customer wants to engage with us on, we can, and they get a seamless experience as they move across. So, if they drop from web chat into talking to someone on the phone or in-branch, we understand what they have talked about."

The cloud migration, therefore, also coincides with a sharper focus of IT resources towards customers, specifically in terms of developing better online and mobile apps for customers.

"Today, we have limited internet capabilities in terms of what customers can do online. We have the branch network, we have the contact centres. Where we want to go, though, is much more online where customers can choose how and when they talk to us," he says.

As a result, the cloud shift won't see Leeds shed staff, but quite the opposite: Clark plans to increase staffing from 90 in January to 124 by the end of the year so that more developments, especially in mobile, can be done.

Driving development

The IT department that Clark oversees is, broadly speaking, split into three main teams: IT services, which looks after internal IT hardware, providing second-level infrastructure support; change delivery, which examines business challenges and masterminds process change, as well as IT change; and, software delivery.

"Software delivery also does a lot of the integration as well. And, within the software delivery team, we [also] have system testing, software architecture, and software build," says Clark. It is also responsible for running Leeds Building Society's in-house developed business intelligence system, that is used in-branch.

[Next page: Coordinating IT and business processes across the organisation, and staff challenges]

How Leeds Building Society's move to the cloud is supporting a mobile-first application development focus

Shifting Leeds Building Society's core banking platform to the cloud is just the start of a customer-focused, mobile-first revolution, CIO Tom Clark tells Computing

Software delivery will also be responsible for a mobile-first app schedule, turning around the old way of designing for the web/PC first and then porting that to mobile, and intended to make it easier for customers to interact with the building society and use its services. "A lot of our current projects are in the omni-channel space," Clark says.

Coordinating developments is the project management office (PMO). It is intended to make sure that the building society's resources are invested wisely, and incorporates app development needs from across the organisation. "The intention of the PMO is that we look very closely at what we invest in and make sure that we make our investment decisions in the right way," says Clark.

And, finally, overseeing and masterminding it all is the enterprise architecture board, the "governing body" where Leeds Building Society makes the big IT decisions based on the organisation's wider strategy and investment decisions. It therefore helps to coordinate IT work with the building society's broader business goals.

"We have a software architect, a business architect and an infrastructure architectural team and, between the three of them, we will work towards the best solution. The enterprise architecture board is the governing body where we make those decisions which feeds into business investment decisions," says Clark.

That has gone hand-in-hand with a business-process review and an examination of existing systems and software currently used to support those processes. "We mapped those together and looked at the underlying technology that those systems are based on and, then, considered the 'supportability' of those," says Clark.

The aim was to ascertain which underlying technologies supporting applications across the organisation have a long-term future, and which could be out-of-date within a year or two. The aim of this process is to inform underlying technology decisions, as well as helping to prioritise application and system refreshes.

Under Clark, the software development team has also shifted over to agile with the appointment of a team leader experienced in the methodology. "She was highly experienced in agile... There's daily stand-ups as to who's doing what, and which 'sprints' people are doing. It's proved to be a huge benefit to the business. The feedback we have got from it is that there's so much more involvement. The business feels more a part of it, too, and it's just a more collaborative approach," says Clark.

DevOps, however, is more something for the future, he adds. "We have some highly specialised infrastructure people, which we keep separate from development."

Staff challenges

However, one of the key challenges for Leeds Building Society as it looks to increase IT team numbers, particularly in app development, is simply finding and attracting appropriately skilled staff - an increasing challenge for organisations of all types across the UK.

"For some jobs, we can get a huge number of applicants, but the quality's not right. With other jobs, we get very few. What we are seeing is a lot of organisations are active in the jobs market at the moment. So, you make an offer to someone you have interviewed, and they have already accepted an offer from somewhere else, even though we have tried to compress the time that it takes to recruit new staff," says Clark.

That doesn't look like a challenge that will be solved any time soon, although at the same time Clark has also introduced a British Computer Society (BCS) inspired personal development programme, based on SFIAplus, intended to help staff evaluate their skills and work out their career development paths, providing training accordingly.

"We've mapped a job description to a set of skills - ranked one to seven - and the individual can say, 'I'm in a job today requiring this skill at level two, but for the job I want to do requires level three'. They can then look at the training available to take them from level two to three," says Clark.

While this has only been introduced at the organisation this year, in theory, therefore, the hottest new application developers at Leeds Building Society could come from Clark's own IT services team rather than direct from university - just in time to work on the slew of new mobile and other apps that the developers at the Leeds are about to get their teeth into.