Reigniting Yorkshire Building Society’s digital future

Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) is the UK’s third largest building society with 150 years of experience in providing its three million members with mortgages, savings and retirement products. It manages around £40 billion of assets and is headquartered in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Having built a solid reputation as a trustworthy custodian of its members’ money, YBS wanted to go one step further. Having built some mobile products only a couple of years before, YBS decided that its members should have access to even greater insight and transparency on the mortgage and savings products they held. Getting the right fit with an external digital supplier was vital for the organisation - particularly given two previous attempts at working with digital suppliers had been unsuccessful due to differences in culture and attitude. Given its own reputation for going beyond delivery - and putting people at the heart of everything it does - xDesign was perfectly placed to support YBS in not only reigniting two of its flagship digital products, but also in redefining its vision for purpose-driven digital products.

On taking up the project, it was important for xDesign to immerse itself in exactly what YBS - and its members - needed from digital products. As a result, a thorough discovery process was conducted. Following a series of deep-dive discovery workshops, we developed a strategic ‘North Star’ which would direct both xDesign and the in-house team at YBS to create more meaningful digital products and releases across its whole digital delivery arm. Importantly, it has also allowed both parties to unlock greater cohesion among development teams working on a variety of different web-based and mobile products. As a result, YBS now has a clearer strategic vision of what its digital future should look like, along with a number of KPIs to work towards.

People are central to xDesign’s philosophy for digital success. Without the right people, digital projects of all kinds risk withering on the vine. With this in mind, we collaborated with YBS to put solid foundations in place when it comes to hiring tech talent. Given the widening skills gap that currently exists in the tech sector, xDesign worked to equip YBS with the right processes and interview skills to attract increasing numbers of talented technologists. Providing this service means that the organisation now has the right talent infrastructure in place to meet its future digital ambitions. We’ve also supported it in supercharging its workflow processes and the collaborative elements of its culture. An important aspect of our work has been to provide Agile Coaching to its digital teams, whilst helping to modernise ways of working - for instance via coaching on product and backlog prioritisation. All of this work has seen xDesign go beyond mere delivery. It’s set YBS up for the long term and ensured it has the processes, people and culture to meet the sector’s demand for greater agility and effectiveness.

In tandem with our work to build YBS’s talent processes, xDesign embedded iOS and Android engineers into the client’s existing team and set about enhancing some of the core features of its savings app. Drawing on the coaching and workflow processes it had put in place previously, xDesign supported the YBS digital team in putting its learning into practice. In the space of just three months, the team was able to unblock a hefty delivery pipeline in order to launch a milestone release on the savings app - the first in nearly two years. xDesign’s approach to rapid prototyping has now been rolled out across the organisation’s various digital delivery teams, with new features for its mortgage app due to be launched in early 2023.