PegaWorld 2025: How Nationwide Building Society Selected Pega Customer Decision Hub and Centralized Brain to Leapfrog the Competition

PegaWorld 2025: How Nationwide Building Society Selected Pega Customer Decision Hub to Leapfrog the Competition

So good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining the session. Um, we're here to hear from Nationwide about how they selected Pega CDH to leapfrog the competition. Sorry for any competition in the room. Um, so I know there's some fascinating insights here, especially for those of you who may be thinking about a centralized personalization strategy. Or maybe you're early on your journey.

So without further ado, I'll hand you over to Amitesh Mishra CIO of Customer Experience platforms and Rob Christie Head of Personalisation Strategy & Decisioning over to you guys. Thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. I was slightly worried at the end of the day that no one was going to turn up, so thanks very much for, for for joining us. Lots of familiar faces, which is lovely to see.

Um, just before we get into our story, as Miranda said about how we've been on our journey of personalization, how we set our strategy, how we created the case for change, how we chose Pega CDH, why Pega CDH is so important to success in that strategy? Um, and a little bit about our results and how we're, how we're doing. Um, I just wanted to, uh, to talk about, um, I'm not sure this works. I'll do it. Is that all right to get rid of that?

Um, I just wanted to talk a bit about Nationwide Building Society. So I know that some of you, especially those of you from the UK, will know who nationwide is. But just to make sure that everyone knows who Nationwide are, and also because I think it's really important context to our personalization strategy as well and what we're trying to achieve. So we are the world's largest building society. We've got over 17 million customers. We're solely based to serve the UK market.

Um, and to be a member of Nationwide, you need to have a current account savings or mortgage. We do also offer credit cards and loans and, uh, protection products and home insurance as well. Um, but we are run for our members, so we don't have shareholders. All of the profits that we make, uh, and derive from the business all go back into benefits for our customers.

So just to bring that to life, um, we've just recently, as of last week, had our financial results for the year, and we've given back just short of 2.8 billion pounds back to our members in financial benefit. Um, and for anyone that is a Nationwide customer, you'll know driven by Pega CDH. Last week we communicated to our customers that we were going to give them 100 pounds, which is the third time that we've done that over the last three years as part of our fairer share, um, payment.

And again, that's bringing to life being part of a mutual. When we do well, so do our customers. Um, and the other 1.8 billion is, uh, better products and services as well. So, um, we've got 18,000 employees. We are completely committed to having a branch presence. So we've got something called, um, our branch promise, which means that up until at least 2028, we will make sure that we continue to have branches on the high street in some cities. Unfortunately, we are the last branch in town.

But it's really, really important for us as an organization. And you'll see later when it comes to our personalization strategy, how that's really important as well In terms of our purpose. As it says there, it's banking, but fairer, more rewarding and for the good of society. The banking but fairer is all about us using our role as a mutual and our growing scale to make sure that we are playing a really significant role in making UK banking better and fairer, the more rewarding and for the good.

So the more rewarding element is absolutely, as I've just talked about in terms of giving money back to our customers.

Like I said, we don't have shareholders, so that gives us a new position to make sure that our customers get the most out of their relationship with Nationwide and for the good of society is where, again, using our mutual model, our scale, our size, our voice, our expertise to make sure that we're having a say and making a difference to those things that really make a difference to our community.

So we are very focused on trying to improve things from a child poverty perspective, from a homelessness perspective, supporting dementia and also cancer as well. So we've got some partnerships with some amazing charities there as well. It's great to have like a helper isn't it? It's brilliant. I'm loving this. Could get used to it couldn't I? This is a partnership.

So you know just remember um, so in terms of our strategy, just to take it back to the personalization strategy and what we're here to talk about today. So about two years ago, we set off on our journey. The first thing that we needed to do is to align on what personalization meant for Nationwide and what the opportunity was.

Uh, we also did a big capability review, because the important thing was to demonstrate to our senior leadership that whilst there was a huge amount of opportunity in what we could do from a personalization, we were quite far behind in terms of our peers. So we were expertly supported by our friends from Optima, who did a fair bit of work with us to make sure that we understood where we were against our peers.

And as you can see, the little red box, Unfortunately, the team were doing the best with the tools and the tech that they had, but ultimately we weren't delivering a lot of personalization for our customers. A lot of it was predetermined batch type communications. Um, and it was really important that we brought that to life. So people understood the scale of the investment that we needed.

The other thing that we were really importantly wanted to to bring to life for our leadership team as well, is that, um, there's no point having the best technology in the market if you're not using it in the right way. And again, thinking back to our status as a mutual, we felt quite passionately that that combination of capability and purpose was going to serve us.

Well, um, I had to sort of mask the the with some exes, but hopefully, hopefully that gives a good indication of the amount of investment that we needed, both in terms of growing our technology and improving it, but also growing the size of our teams. But the amount of value that was on offer from from this strategy, as well as improving the customer experience as well. In terms of just go to the next slide, please. Um, in terms of, uh, the four areas that we focused on.

So as part of that capability review and as part of the personalization strategy, creating that sort of case for change in the business case, we concentrated on four key areas. So technology like I said, we didn't have a technology stack that had been invested in. It wasn't some of the market leading tools that we know that others had.

So we set out and Amitesh will talk about it in more detail later, but we set out to do a large scale procurement process to go out and benchmark ourselves against others and go and find the tools that we needed. And that obviously led us to to purchasing. Uh Pega Customer Decision Hub. No point having the tools and the platforms if you're not feeding it with data. Like lots of large organizations, especially in financial services. Are data needed some improvement, so we had gaps in our data.

It might not be at the right velocity or latency that we needed. So, um, lots and lots of effort to make sure that we had the right data strategy as well. From a marketing consensus perspective. So we historically had an issue with things like email addresses and consent to be able to talk to people through email.

So that was a big part of our strategy, reimagining that whole proposition with our customers and then going out and making sure that we were taking the right opportunities to ask customers at the right time to see if they would opt in. And then the people and skills was a massive, massive part of the change that we've gone through in the last couple of years.

So, um, we as part of the capability review, sort of we had about roughly 60 people in the business function by the time, uh, two years later, we've now got 170 people. So it shows the amount of growth that we had just in our team, as well as Amitesh Mishra team growing as well. We created centers of excellence, so we're quite lucky in in our function that we have everything that you would need to be able to create and deliver personalized interactions all within one team.

So whether that's teams that are setting targets, doing the planning, the stakeholder relationship management teams that are building the interactions in Pega CDH, data science teams, teams that are evaluating success, all of the content, all of that stuff sits in one area. But we needed to grow those teams and create those deep verticals and centers of excellence. Then the other thing that we did is we created squads.

So we wanted to make sure that we had this model where the people from the centers of excellence would come together, they'd coalesce around outcomes. So the squads would be focused on delivering a particular outcome. So we had a squad, for example, for loans, for lending. We had a squad for customer experience, and we made sure that those squads were able to deliver and deliver at pace.

And then the other thing that I just wanted to call out from a people in skills Perspective is the reason why we're on the stage together. I'm on the more business side and Amitesh is on the technology side, making sure that we had great relationships and that we were spending lots and lots of time right from the outside. So we did the strategy together.

We did the procurement process, we chose the technology together, and we've now been implementing it together and making sure that your business and tech are aligned and working together has been really, really important.

And then the last thing to say is, I can see some of you here today making sure that we had really strong partnership with our vendors, but also our key partners as well, the likes of Optima and Merkel was super, super important to us as well as we went on the journey of implementation. In terms of the vision. So our vision is to create the best customer outcomes from personalization of any bank anywhere. I should say that there's quite a lot of we are going to be better than the competition.

And I know some of you are sat here today, so I do apologize. But we when you were in a place where you weren't, where you need to be. From our hearts and minds perspective, it was really important that we set a really compelling vision and that we were really ambitious about what we wanted to do, and we gave our teams the confidence that we were going to do it as well.

The other thing, just to call out in terms of this vision, which was really important to align on and make sure that everyone across the society was brought into this, especially when you're then choosing a tool like Pega CDH to get the most out of its capability is to make sure that this is right across all touchpoints and channels. So the sort of more traditional marketing channels from an outbound perspective. Absolutely.

Making sure that as those communications go to customers, they're timely, they're relevant. They're useful. When customers come into our key digital channels like the mobile app and the internet bank, making sure that we're connecting that experience and then really excitingly, our human channels as well.

So I mentioned earlier that the branch network is a huge part of Nationwide strategy, making sure that the central brain is decisioning and delivering expert sessions across all the channels, including when our members are stood in front of our colleagues as well. Um, just to bring that a bit more to life in terms of the use cases that we had, um, again, our strategy is about making sure that we are supporting the whole of the relationship with the customer.

So, as you might expect, and we have been very, very focused on the two top rows, we have quite a stretching business case to achieve. But making sure that we're identifying need, we're cross- selling products into our 70 million base, making sure that customers are using our products in a way that is profitable to Nationwide, but also useful to our customers. That's been a big focus, as you might expect, but also creating those moments to bring to life what it means to be part of a mutual.

So from a customer engagement perspective, when are those moments to say, this is what it means to be part of a mutual. These are the things that are going to make life easier and better for you from a cost reduction point of view.

So where it's right for the customer, if there are opportunities to identify opportunities where we might be able to direct them and help them to get to where they need to get to, and that might mean not having to phone into a contact center and then from a vulnerability and avoiding customer harm perspective.

Again, we see loads and loads of potential with how personalization can support customers that might be in some kind of financial distress, might be vulnerable, and also importantly, we might be able to identify those triggers or those signals that might lead to that distress before it happens as well.

So again, just in terms of alignment of strategy, it was super important for people to be bought into what that vision and what the use case is and that sort of broad customer relationship would look like. Um, the other thing that we did is we spent time and effort. I think we created about 30 of these in the end, when we were getting the strategy signed off and the business case, we took time to make sure.

And I'm really glad that we did to bring to life what it would look like for customers and for the business. So this is an example for our lending side of the business for loans. Huge part of growth for Nationwide at the moment is in this area. It was one of the first squads that we stood up, but making sure that we took time to bring to life what it will look like at the end of our, um, our strategy sort of cycle over those five years.

So I won't go into this in too much detail because hopefully it's sort of relatively self-explanatory. But, uh, from the left to the right, we've got use of high impact placements on our mobile app.

So where we're using our understanding of this particular customer to say that you could save money if you took your car finance and took out a loan with Nationwide through to the customer, taking and starting that application, making sure that we're scraping that data in real time to send automated communications, then back into the mobile app where the customer is then taking the application and then through to the loan being ready, and then starting to think about what the other next best actions.

In this case, it was home insurance. And then I think I'm going to hand over now to Amitesh, who's going to talk about, uh, specifically how we chose Pega. CDH. Sorry, can you all hear me in the back? All right, so in line with the business strategy and vision that Rob just outlined, uh, the challenge that my team had got was how do we stand up? A modern marketing technology platform from the ground up. Right. So rewind back like three years from now. 2023 is when we started the journey.

So we started by first aligning ourselves to some guiding principles, right. Because we thought that aligned to the strategy, we need to kind of align with some guiding principles that will help us define the target state. So from a business perspective, how do we maximize total total value for our customers. Right. How do we deliver next best outcome for the customer?

Not from a not only from a sales perspective, but also from a from an experience perspective and helping and making their lives better. Right. So that that. So some of the principles that in the business category, how do we empower our colleagues with, uh, state, state of the art, uh, capability that allows them to do personalization at scale, right. So not not just like hundreds of actions, but thousands of actions, uh, across channels. Right.

Uh, and from a customer perspective, more importantly, how do we help customers maximize their value with us and, uh, deliver a connected experience through the central brain? Right. So, so there's a bunch of principles that we agreed between our team and Rob's team. Uh, we then set out to kind of look for a ideal product.

Uh, but before we started any procurement activity, we thought it would be good to take a step back and list down all the key capabilities that you need in a, in a modern marketing, uh, platform. Right. So based on the requirements from the strategy that Rob and team outlined, uh, we listed down a few key capabilities that we wanted to have. So in Nationwide we have this framework called. It's called Ludus. It's listen and understand, decide and act.

So listen understand is all about ingesting customer data, creating the profile. Stitching it all together. Creating a 360 view on the customer. So basically how well we understand our customer and members decide is acting on the data and doing real time decisions in milliseconds. And then acting is about activating it on the channel of choice, right? So we listed the capabilities in those three groups. We then did a very comprehensive assessment of our current state. Right.

So this is three years back from now when we started off obviously we had a lot of gaps. The grays that you see on the picture, this is where either we did not have a capability or it was not fit for purpose. So we had a lot of issues like there was no real time capability. Uh, there was no, uh, everything was batch based. So from the point a customer came to us online to the time we delivered marketing to them. It could take anywhere between 4 to 5 days. Right.

So, so so I'm not going to cover all of them. But you know, there's several issues in the existing stack, right? All legacy and vulnerable platforms. So we then so once we had a very clear understanding of what we need, we then launched into a comprehensive RFP. Uh, we we looked at both sides of the spectrum. Right. So we looked at some of the large players like Pega, Adobe, Salesforce, etc.

we also looked at some niche players in the market who provide like individual capacity capabilities, not like the whole stack. And after a lot of scoring assessment, you know, we spend a lot of time analyzing these products, POCs, a lot of hands on, etc. we landed on Pega CDH as our main, uh, marketing tech platform. Uh, we also had to go for a CDP to support Pega, and I'll show that later in the architecture.

Uh, once we get to that and we, we mapped Pega to the different capabilities that we had outlined. So this is just to be clear on what are we trying to solve for and how do we architect the whole stack. Right. So we signed up the contract with Pega, I think April 2024 last year. And then we mobilized into a program of implementation. It took us about two months to assemble the team. You know, we took help from some of our partners as well as hired a lot of permanent staff.

So somewhere around July last year, we started the journey. Fast forward about six months from then in January, we went live with our first two channels. And this is what we have today, right? So this is a simple, sort of oversimplified view of our architecture. So Pega sits in the middle. So think of it as the brain that decides all the next best action for customers. We feed we feed Pega with everything that we have on the customer. Right.

So demographic, transactional, financial, third party and credit data, etc. so all the batch based data comes into Pega overnight and all the live customer signals are fed via CDP in real time. So this is why we needed a CDP to tank real time signals into Pega. And Pega is then deciding the next best action. So we have a library of about 150 plus now, which then delivers prompts into the digital channel on the mobile and internet bank.

We are going live with email as we speak this month, and then followed by further capabilities like push and Human channels again, just to bring this to life. Right. So if a nationwide customer comes to our UK website and looks for a loan or fills in a loan calculator, we are able to ingest that signal in less than five milliseconds, push it into Pega and deliver a personalized, personalized banner to the customer, all in less than three seconds. Right, so that's the power of the platform.

I mean, look, you may ask, why is this so different from what others are doing? Right. So a couple of things I wanted to call out. So first is for us, it was like completely ground up implementation. So we didn't have existing things that we upgraded and added to. Right. So we just completely went back to the drawing board and architected the solution. Second is Pega is our main platform. So although we have a CDP, we don't use CDP to collect a lot of data. It's just to pass through into Pega.

So we have used Pega as our main data platform for marketing. And probably the third differentiator is the way we have implemented Pega with some of our channels. Right. So we've done a very native integration so we didn't have to buy another yet another tool to render the message on the channel. Right. So it's a very native connectivity. So so this is our stack. I mean we have just started as of now I think it's a five year journey. And like, you know, just to finish like, you know, how did we get this done in six months. I mean very simple, right? So three parts from the outset, I think the strategy was very, very clear. So the stuff that Rob showed, I think we spent a lot of time upfront creating the strategy, making sure the teams understand what we are trying to deliver. Everything is underpinned by a data strategy. So we again spend a lot of time deciding the data model.

Where do we want to land the data batch versus real time. So all of that was done upfront before we started building it. And I think the most important bit is what Rob covered earlier right. The colleague part. So we set up a squad model using both permanent staff as well as help of our partners. Uh, so so that's it. Right. So I think this is this is where we are today. I think Rob will now cover what the results look like. Yeah. Great. Thanks.

Um, so we're just going to finish with a couple of slides in terms of performance, uh, and how it's working. As I said, we're a few months in now, uh, into our implementation and being live on the mobile app and the internet bank. So I've just pulled out three actions of the 150, 160 actions that are live at the moment. The first one is what Amitesh was talking about in terms of utilizing the power of our customer data platform and Pega's decisioning.

So this is absolutely what Amitesh talked about earlier in terms of those signals, those breadcrumbs, those things, the context of what the customer is doing on our digital channels, whether it's application journeys on the internet bank or the mobile app on co.uk. We're able to pick those up. We've got pre-built actions. And then, like Amitabh said, within seconds, that message is available for customers. Should that be the most appropriate next, next next best action.

I think what's really exciting with this capability for me is back to the strategy again. So at the moment we're in the process of creating next best actions for all of the trigger points from a product opening point of view. So where are customers dropping out of application journeys? And absolutely, that's really important from a commercial point of view. But back to our strategy where we are trying to maximize experience, customer value and being profitable as well.

Um, things like if a customer is looking at pages where they might want a holiday break from their mortgage payment, for example, this capability can be used for that to make sure that next best action is there to support the customer as well. The big thank you for anyone that banks with Nationwide, they might know that as part of in March.

So only a month into the implementation we shared with our customers as part of the big thank you, we gave just over 13 million customers 50 pounds to say thank you from the Virgin Money deal where we'd, uh, bought Virgin Money. And that was a great example where we tested out the capability within Pega CDH to almost bypass all of the smart smart decisioning and make sure that the customer saw this message.

This was super important from a customer engagement and a brand perspective and just being the right thing for the customer. So surprise, surprise, if you tell customers that they're going to get £50, they quite like that message. So we saw engagement rocket up. But I think the other thing that I just wanted to touch on is absolutely the right thing to do from a long term brand, from a customer point of view.

But what was interesting when we started to look at the results after that is that that took share of voice away from other things, and we started to see outcomes for other things decline over a short period of time. So you kind of have to be okay with that. And then the last one that I just wanted to call out again, coming back to the strategy of making sure that we've got nest spec sections that represent truly what the customer wants and needs is a savings maturity action, where the customer is in danger of ending up on a poor rate if they don't take action. So making sure that those sorts of actions are available and making sure that they're being decisions amongst everything else.

And then just lastly, actually we've got two more things to share. Sorry, just in terms of the performance. So this is a summary three months into our implementation and thankfully we have seen over 100% increase in customer engagement. So we're we're looking to see are we serving the right things at the right time to the right customers? Yes we are. We're seeing over 100% in improvement in customers clicking. And importantly, that's turning into an increase in outcomes as well.

So over 20% increase in the value that we're generating on the mobile channel as well since we've gone live. So that's fantastic. Amitesh Mishra earlier talked about the number of actions. A key part of our strategy is that we need the squads to be able to scale and build actions quickly. And since going live, we've already added another 50 or 60 actions since then. So the teams are also having to do some of the integration and connections to other channels.

So we're really happy that whilst they're also doing that, they're able to scale and they're able to add more and more actions through Pega CDH as well, which is Fantastic. And the other thing I guess to say is it's learning and it's getting better. The number of active models has doubled since Go live, which just means that Pega is getting smarter and better and better at at decisioning, which is great.

The last thing I'm just going to finish with is because we've kind of alluded to it a few times, but we're still very much at the start of our journey. So, um, we will continue to scale on the IBM mobile, on the internet bank story and the mobile app. But at the same time, as you alluded to this month, we will be going in two weeks time. We'll be going live with our first email campaigns through, um, through, uh CDH.

We'll connect mail, we'll connect push, which is a new capability for us that we delivered in February. Uh, the human channels I mentioned earlier, that is a really exciting development as well, in terms of making sure that we're serving up the right next best actions for our colleagues in the contact center and the branch network. And then we'll also look at the website and paid media as well. So we've got a lot to do over the next six months. But it's really exciting.

And um, and we're very grateful and thankful that the signs are really, really positive so far in terms of performance and the things that we set out to achieve. So I think we've got time for some questions. Hopefully if anyone has anything they'd like to ask. Yes. So, um, if you could step up to one of the mics and stand nice and close. Yeah, I can hear you if there are questions. Thank you.

While we're waiting for questions, just just to mention right on the human channels, we're actually going to use Pega Customer Service. So that's something that we're experimenting with now. Right. So the next best actions from CDH will be surfaced on Customer Service, which was demoed in the keynote keynote today. Right. So it will be a good thing to try out. Yeah. So a question. Hey guys. Great job. Um, question about the email. So I saw on your tech stack you had Adobe campaign. Yep.

For email, is Pega replacing Adobe Campaign or is it an integration between the two? That's a really interesting one. Right. So so right now we have Adobe campaign. It does both of our marketing as well as transactional emails. So for day one we are going with campaign. We'll connect Pega with campaign. But we are looking for a replacement and we're looking looking for maybe next year, you know, to find like an email only vendor. Because for digital prompts we have done a native integration.

So we don't need a full fledged campaign tool. We could go with something like, you know, I'm just going to take some names, but you know, Braze and MailChimp and stuff like that. Yeah. I think the other thing just to say is that when Amitesh was talking about the full work that we needed to do from a capability point of view, we specifically focused on the things that we needed to solve first. So making sure that we bought a real time decisioning engine, making sure that we sorted out the data.

Um, but we've also looked at how we can improve the whole content supply chain. So how can we make sure that if we're creating thousands and thousands of actions, that the rest of the team can create the content at the same time? So that's our current focus at the moment. Now to start to make the right choices, to finish off, I guess, the journey that we started in terms of giving our colleagues the best possible marketing stack. And just to say, Bruce. Right. Yeah.

I was talking to one of your colleagues earlier that you you did a fab presentation at an event last year, and that was super helpful when we were at the very start of our journey. I remember you talking about the three stools and making sure that you've got your partners, your organization lined up and your vendors as well. So yeah, good job yourself. All right. Hey, guys. Thanks for putting this up.

I was just wondering, you know, lots of stories of what worked, what didn't work great out of here. So. Yeah. So, look, I mean, when we were buying Pega, right? We were wondering, how do we pipe real time data into Pega? And we didn't have a customer data platform, right? So we had Adobe Analytics, which captured all the clickstream channel interaction, but there was no way of plugging that into Pega. So we had to go and buy expensive CDP.

So although we did that, I mean, if I would do it again, I'd probably look at some cheaper alternatives because we've got a very lightweight CDP. We're not using it as a customer data platform. That's probably one thing which I would reflect on. Rob.

Yeah, I think from a business side, I think one of the things that whilst I'm super, super proud of the pace in which we delivered from, as Emma said, from really standing up the program in July to being live in February, I think that's absolutely fantastic effort from all the teams. But I think one of the things that if I had the time again, we had a lot of the team that hadn't used Pega before and had used unica for a long time, we went out and bought Pega expertise.

We obviously had the support from Pega and the likes of merkel as well, but I think if I had the time again, I probably would have started the training and support for the team that are building the actions a bit earlier. I think we probably inadvertently put a bit too much pressure on them in a short period of time, so probably be from my perspective. Hi. Thank you so much for this presentation. I think it's been really great.

Um, one of the things that really stuck, stuck out to me was the combination between your business collaboration and your technology collaboration. And I'm just kind of wondering, you know, has that always been the case for your business, or was there case for change management there, too, of having both teams work together and how you made that happen? Yeah, I mean, I've been at Nationwide for 17 years, so maybe I can answer that one in terms of what's changed.

So from my perspective, having a technology function that is dedicated to what we're trying to do that are absolutely experts in. Having implemented marketing technology in other organizations was a massive game changer. So. Amitesh Mishra team have done an absolutely brilliant, brilliant job. And I think, as we alluded to earlier. Making sure that we were aligned from the start. So, um, for example, our bosses went to the expo.

Together to present the strategy in the and asked for the investment. So I think from day one, uh. It's been a proper collaborative effort, and I think that wasn't the case before. You know, people were doing a great job before, but we shared. Technology Services with HR. With finance, you were working with someone that's just implemented an HR. System, not a marketing technology stack. So that's been, you know, revolutionary. And, um.

And I think the support and challenge is there to make sure that if we have got challenges, we get together and we we solve them together. So, um, yeah. I think you've got. You can't disagree with that because it'd be awkward, right? Concretely agreed. Okay. So first of all, fantastic job to get all that up and running in six months. That's amazing.

Um, you obviously you have, um, Pega sort of in the center, but you also have a lot going on here with content with Sitecore and Adobe and, um, just curious of what you've seen with Blueprint, how you might see some of that eventually integrating with the operations and the content flow into the system and the integration? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I saw Blueprint for the first time today, really. So I'm super excited about the opportunity.

I'd heard bits and bobs about it, but we've kind of been heads down doing our implementation. So, um, yeah, absolutely. As you said, you know, I think your question was also an answer, really. I think there's loads of opportunity for us to look at, uh Blueprint to see how we can accelerate the build of actions from a content perspective as well as a decisioning perspective as well. So very interested to see how it might fit in the stack.

But yeah, that whole content supply chain, like I said before, is a focus for us. We are. It's too hard work for the team at the moment. We did a session in the summer, didn't we, last year and we asked the people that are doing it day in, day in, day out. We said, do a demo for us, show us, but just show us how bad it is. Like just don't try and shortcut it. And I think my boss at one point sent me a message saying, can you make it stop?

Uh, so, uh, so yeah, we've got to solve that for our colleagues and for the team as well. So that'll be a key focus for us. I know we're almost out of time. This is just kind of asking you questions. But my question for you, Rob, is like, you've been through this. If you had to do it again or you had some recommendations, what would be the one thing you wouldn't do? Like, is there a good lesson that people can take forwards to avoid some pain that you face.

Yeah, I think the it's back to the speed to market point. So I think we had to get going. We, uh, you know, the clock started ticking for a business case. When you get a business excited about a strategy, you almost create a challenge for yourself to say, okay, go on then. So I think the speed element and getting the right balance between going fast at stuff but not making too many compromises.

And like I said, from an employee point perspective, I think maybe at times we maybe put a bit too much pressure on people. So I think if I had the time again, maybe there's a few things that I could do slightly differently in terms of making sure that we were still going fast, but it felt good for people and we were getting that balance right. That probably be the main thing from my side. Um, be ambitious, but be realistic, baby. Yeah. I had a couple of questions.

One was around prioritization for your squads in terms of how do you go about picking what's next on your actual library, and just related to that, for the stuff that's running on unica, do you keep that running in parallel and kind of see which ones perform better, or have you decommissioned that completely? You said you're starting from scratch, but I wonder if so, the plan. So the plan is to decommission all the gray stuff on the left side. So we're waiting for the email channel to go live.

And then after that we'll decommission unica. Maybe you want to take the next best action question. Yeah, yeah. So in terms of how we decide, uh, what the library of next best actions, what our backlog is. So we uh, as I mentioned before, we've got squads set up. So we've got about nine different squads that are focused on outcomes, uh, that align to the strategy.

The idea is that those squads are truly autonomous to decide what they want to create based on the outcomes that they're trying to drive. Um, So that's how the model works. I then have another part of my team that's called the contact strategy and Decisioning team. And their job is to take the actions from the squads, and one practically put them through the release weekly release process to put them live.

But the other role that they play is that they've set the contact strategy, they set the channel strategy, and they're there in the nicest possible way to make sure that the squads aren't doing anything that doesn't align to that as well. So they play that role as well. So but the idea is that squads know the outcomes that they're trying to drive. So they should be autonomous to decide what their backlog of actions are.

Now obviously, to get us started, there was more control than I'm describing because we needed to make sure that we had the right mix of actions live from day one. Back to the strategy. How do we make sure we've got a mix of actions that drive value, actions that are about the customer experience, actions that bring to life what being part of the mutual is all about?

So at the start, we were maybe a bit more in control than we would do in a sort of normal process with the squads are deciding and the squads are being enabled by the other parts of of my team. Probably just to add the squads are product aligned. Right. So you have got a current account squad of mortgages. We've got mixture actually. Yeah. So just to bring to life we've got some again to the strategy of making sure that we're focusing on lots of, of elements of the strategy.

So we've got a number of squads that are absolutely aligned through products, as Amitesh said. But then we've got other squads like the Customer Experience Squad, whose role is to make sure that we've got actions that are aligned to that part of the strategy. So, for example, they delivered the big thank you action that I showed earlier. And they'll support, um, all of the other sorts of campaigns that line to that part of the strategy as well. Hi.

Um, I just have one question about the the connection between Pega and your act. Um, you're at platforms, any learnings on the APIs that you're likely using to make those connections. Yeah. So, um, so as I mentioned earlier, right. So we have done a native integration. So what happens is when, when any, any of our customer logs on to mobile, uh, there's a call made to a couple of APIs that we have hosted on AWS. Those APIs then call Pega and fetch the next best action available for the user. So every for every mobile login, there's a call made to Pega through the AWS APIs. So that's why I mean the box over there says Pega plus Sitecore. So Pega gets the content. Uh, Sitecore does all the CMS, so it stitches it together, and then it publishes a banner in the app. Right. Thanks again. Both. That was a fascinating presentation. Really well done. And thanks to everyone for coming. Thank you. Thank you.