When Carole Roberts joined Leeds Building Society (LBS) in 2020 the board recognised data hadn’t received the right focus on investment required to drive the organisation forward. “That’s where my new role as Director of Data came in,” she explains. “It was my job to create a compelling case for change which highlighted the importance of storytelling around why data matters. But why should data make it to the top of everyone’s to do list? I was fortunate to be able to spend time influencing and telling the stories. It’s important to make sure we’re in a position to effect positive change, but do so proportionately while demonstrating value as we go.”
Digital Transformation driven by Data
LBS is in the third year of its largest ever data program as a Society. Roberts is responsible for data across the core program and director of the data migration initiative upgrading customer accounts. She explains that data journey is part of a wider digital transformation program with several areas of focus.
“We are replacing our core banking platform, our actual transactional state of record systems, which customer accounts are ultimately hosted on. It’s where transactions are posted, where we maintain customer records. Currently, we have a monolithic system that handles everything. We’ve made the decision to move to a composable architecture. It’s going to give us much more flexibility in the future to be able to swap in and out components rather than one big monolithic environment. We’re effectively moving from a big system with some small components around it to a whole ecosystem of different elements that have to be able to interact with each other. Architecturally it looks more complex but creates a much better future platform for the organisation as we move forward. We are creating capabilities optimised to meet our members’ needs.”
The Data journey
The data journey for LBS is playing a key role in how the Society processes insights and manages its resources. “One example is understanding why customers are contacting us,” explains Roberts. “LBS is dealing with an increasing number of calls. We examined how we could reduce the core volume and service our members better. We actually didn’t know, because we didn’t know why people were ringing us. So, we did a detailed study to give us those insights. We gave automated notifications to our members on things like deposits into a savings account. We automatically notified them when we received paperwork. By reducing non-value calls we take the pressure off telephony staff to focus on more urgent servicing needs. Data is the key here.”
People & Culture
A great culture allows talent to thrive but it’s also the hardest thing to change believes Roberts. “You’ve got to see that buy-in and take the people with you when it comes to adoption with a technology transformation – both in terms of the colleague and customer sides of the Society’s operations. From a colleague perspective, it’s important we drive forward new capabilities, like data and AI, and create that safe space where people can try new things
