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Campion Willcocks Associates played key roles in the successful integration of the Nationwide and Portman, helping deliver a wide-ranging programme £10m under budget and months ahead of schedule.

With the Nationwide already the UK's biggest building society and Portman the third largest, their merger created the country's second largest mortgage lender and savings provider, with 13 million members and £160 billion in assets. As you'd expect, a huge amount of work was required to integrate the businesses effectively and achieve significant cost efficiencies.

The challenges of change
“I ran the integration,” says Phil McCabe, Portman's former CIO and Programme Director. “This broke down into 20 major projects to be completed in two years, achieving total integration and the resulting cost efficiencies by then. However, there was a serious staff shortage in the Change and IT Divisions so we went to the market. We found very few expert providers - Campion Willcocks is clearly one of the top,” says McCabe. “I‘ve never failed to choose a candidate from a list put forward by them. They're very good at matching the requirement with the right people; plus, they understood our business and how we work.”

Complex requirements
Associate Hermione Dixon was Programme Manager for Payments Migration, managing 40 people and a budget of £3 million. “We wanted someone to take stock of a struggling project and move it forward with minimal input from us,” says McCabe. “Hermione had exactly the right experience and attitude. She saw what was wrong and created a plan to sort it out. Four weeks later, the programme sponsor called to say she had transformed the situation.”

Another key project was supporting historic records in the data migration from Portman legacy systems, which had major implications for how the business interacted with large numbers of customers. This project involved five million savings records going back 15 years, 300,000 mortgage records and 200,000 insurance policies, with data in different formats and needing alignment with Nationwide's numbering system.

"If the project didn't finish as planned we couldn't decommission the Portman systems, which was imperative in driving the cost efficiencies,” says McCabe. Associate Chris Andrews joined as Senior Project Manager, heading a team of 20 and a £1.6m budget. “Chris engaged very professionally with suppliers to help offload project risk, and we had a way to transfer data without using internal resources. He also had to catch countless things thrown in his direction, and dealt with all those unexpected changes and additions admirably.”

In addition, Associate Steve Ball was Implementation Manager for the Mortgage Migration. “We'd introduced the concept of trial runs early and wanted someone to own overall implementation from end of testing onwards,” says McCabe. “Steve grasped the concept fast and we had a great start-up as a result.” Implementation was a huge success, with 85,000 accounts migrated safely from three systems.

Successful outcomes
The integration programme was completed five months ahead of schedule and £10 million under budget. 100% of the cost savings of £90 million, anticipated over three years, were achieved. “It was very important to get excellent people in fast so we could move things forward, and Campion Willcocks provided a significant number of the people we needed to achieve that momentum,” says McCabe.