Interview with Paul French, Director of Business Intelligence, Visualisation and Reporting, Nationwide Building Society
Computing catches up with one of the finalists in the Digital Transformation Project of the Year category at the UK IT Industry Awards 2020
The UK IT Industry Awards is the IT industry's most coveted awards, with each entry subjected to rigorous scrutiny by a panel of expert, independent judges. Being shortlisted is a huge achievement, and one which Paul French, Director of Business Intelligence, Visualisation and Reporting, Nationwide Building Society has recently been able to celebrate. Nationwide was shortlisted along with its partner Thoughtspot, in the Digital Transformation of the Year category.
Computing caught up with French to find out more.
Computing: Tell us about the digital transformation project with NationwidePaul French: A 136-year old building society, we are operating in a completely new landscape with challenger banks, changing regulation, and facing strong economic headwinds. Every decision we make matters. We wanted to tap into our vast data assets to uncover fresh insights for operating successfully in this new landscape and benefitting our 17 million members. To achieve this, we needed to empower colleagues in the business - especially those who deal directly with members - with greater data access and literacy. That's why in 2018, we set a challenge to build a data culture and competence in Nationwide Building Society that would be on par with our marketing, finance and technology competencies.
Through four use cases: mortgage pipeline, savings flow, MemberIQ and Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) ThoughtSpot empowers more than 500 business users (and counting) to contribute to Nationwide's top line business metrics and deliver new digital services.
Mortgage Pipeline - ThoughtSpot lets Nationwide's mortgage product team, finance and operations view information like which mortgage products members are taking, their property values, the amount of money they're borrowing, and through which channels (website, branch, brokers/intermediaries, call centres). This helps teams manage mortgage revenues, the quality of the business, and service those applications effectively.
Savings Flow - This allows users in Nationwide's savings team to view transactions to analyse things like ‘churn' (money going in and out). Savings team users explore transactional patterns associated with events like Covid-19; and also, monthly trends, for example when large volumes of deposits go into savings accounts. This data also helps Nationwide to develop new savings products and determine their launch timing.
MemberIQ - this classic "360 degree" use case gives Nationwide a view of its members' various product holdings. It also classifies members into attitudinal segments so Nationwide can tailor products, services, and marketing to each. MemberIQ data is vital for product teams to identify opportunities to improve products and services for its members.
"Better Value Sooner Safer Happier" (BVSSH) - this is our final and most ground-breaking use case, which is setting the foundation for Nationwide to reach its stated goal: "To deliver new features and services to our members more quickly, especially on our digital platforms, by using new tools and techniques, and changing how we work". BVSSH analyses Nationwide's application data so it can introduce business change fast, cost-effectively, with agility and minimal strain on IT services.
CTG: Walk us through the project, describing the implementation and any challenges you had to overcomePF: Our CDO discovered analytics software ThoughtSpot at an industry event in late 2018. ThoughtSpot ticked all the boxes we were looking for in terms of offering a natural-language, search interface, requiring minimal training, and applying AI to recommend insights by spotting outliers and trends in data.
Following a very rigorous proof-of-concept phase, we adopted ThoughtSpot in early 2019 and went live with the first use case in July 2019.
The biggest challenges the project team had to overcome were cultural and change-related. We were determined to achieve high adoption levels for ThoughtSpot, which meant we really needed to support and communicate with users and other stakeholders throughout the project.
For example, some questioned: ‘why should we introduce yet another business intelligence (BI) tool'? They weren't convinced ThoughtSpot would be any different than previous tools that promoted self-service, but were, in practice, complex to learn and use in the flow of day-to-day work. To overcome resistance, we communicated heavily with stakeholders, and offered training materials and personal assistance (see more below).
CTG: What benefits has the project brought to the organisation?PF: In 25 years working in BI, my ambition has always been to enable true business self-service. In just over a year, ThoughtSpot not only helped us realise our goal to democratise our data, we've achieved levels of self-service that I honestly never thought would be possible. ThoughtSpot now helps 500+ business users to analyse data and make optimal decisions in the areas of mortgage lending, savings, and customer products. Ninety percent of our users who we surveyed agreed that ThoughtSpot adds value to their teams and increases speed to insight. We also have a very high Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 75.
Day-to-day, our most mature ‘mortgage pipeline' use case gives our mortgage product team, finance and operations a real-time view of information like which products members are taking, their property values, the amount of money they're borrowing, and through which channels (website, branch, apps, call centre). ThoughtSpot not only helps our teams generate the right quantity of mortgage revenue, but also the quality. In a split second, ThoughtSpot can identify the least risky potential members in our mortgage pipeline.
With ThoughtSpot we can also quickly react to changing market conditions and bring new products to market quickly. In less than seven working days Nationwide built a ThoughtSpot-powered Mortgage Payment Break analytical solution to quickly react to the Covid crisis. This helped Nationwide to deliver its ‘Our Home Support Package' launched in May this year.
ThoughtSpot also saves us considerable manual time and effort. Before ThoughtSpot, our team received raw mortgage data in huge Excel files attached to emails (9000 per month). The time and effort it took to manually go through these meant only about 90 people were looking at the data. With ThoughtSpot's self-service system, we have more than 200 people sharing the same view, who can explore and drill down into live data.
Other benefits include:
● Response time speed - previously some people didn't look at data because it took days or weeks to analyse themselves or request support from MI/BI experts - by which time it was often out of date. Now answers arrive in a split second. ThoughtSpot also lets users ask follow-up questions with no interruption in flow.
● Data literacy - The ability to go on ‘frictionless' voyages of data discovery makes users more data-literate. The gratification that comes with getting instant insights reinforces people's confidence and interest in using data in all areas of their work.
● AI Insights - ThoughtSpot's SpotIQ tool recommends personalised insights based on data trends and outliers. This lets us challenge our ‘institutional knowledge' by finding patterns and trends in our data that provide new revelations. This awakens us to new business opportunities, and also risks.
CTG: What lessons from this project can be applied to other organisations also working towards digital transformation?PF: In a digital transformation programme like this, technology is only as good as adoption. If people aren't using analytics to change how they work and make smart decisions every day, little else matters. That's why we invested considerable resources into a user adoption programme led by my colleague Elinor Penny. Her top lessons for driving adoption are:
1. Establish power users in your business - anyone who is an advocate and encourages others to use BI tools is only a good thing (and reduces the number of queries back to central BI teams!)
2. Have an approachable support team - there are lots of mechanisms for people to get help, but sometimes we want to talk to a human who can help and give a personal experience. Make time for this.
3. Build a range of learning materials - make them easy to follow, short and quick. Get the balance between short video self-serve training options and in person (or now over video call!) training sessions to make sure there is something for everyone, whatever their learning style.
4. Make it fun - we introduced prize draws for everyone who provided feedback on ThoughtSpot. You could run other types of competitions to draw out people's creativity, like ‘data insight of the month'.
CTG: How did you feel once you heard you'd been shortlisted at the UK IT Industry Awards?PF: In such a difficult year, hearing that we were shortlisted for the UK IT Industry came as a huge morale boost to me personally, and to the whole project team. In transformation programmes, we always say that we should remember to celebrate success. However, too often we get caught up in work and start marching towards the next big milestone. Even the process of preparing and submitting our award nomination provided a valuable opportunity for the team to pause, reflect and put on record the many positive improvements and changes we've managed to embed in Nationwide Building Society. Overall, it's been a terrific experience.