Nationwide banks on SAP

Nationwide Building Society will use the latest version of SAP's banking platform as the foundation for its £300m Voyager business transformation project.

The first phase of Voyager is due for completion by the fourth quarter of 2009 and will see Nationwide pay SAP around £15m in software licence costs and up to £35m for implementation.

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The SAP for Banking platform will replace Nationwide's Unisys and Fujitsu legacy systems for its banking, savings, mortgage and customer service systems.

Speaking to silicon.com, Darin Brumby, Nationwide's divisional director for business systems transformation, said: "Our current systems which support our core retail products are up to, in some cases, 30 years old and certainly no longer support the organisation's future growth, so we're taking a decision to look at the replacement of our current legacy platforms."

It will be the first time the latest version of the platform is rolled out in the UK. Brumby said: "For us being on that latest version here in the UK, we strongly believe, will give us very good first mover advantage in facing up to some of the challenges that organisations like ourselves and other banks are needing to address."

Brumby explained that the new platform will allow the building society to develop new products more quickly and respond to market and regulatory changes.

He described the benefits as a "combination of enabling the creation of new products for our members, lowering our costs, improving our operational efficiency".

The project also represents a change in direction for Nationwide. Brumby said: "We have been historically an in-house development organisation from an IT capability perspective, so this is quite a paradigm shift, to say we won't build it ourselves."

This first phase of Voyager will cost around £160m including - in addition to the SAP technology - hardware upgrades from IBM and consultancy work from KPMG and CapGemini.

Brumby concluded: "It will be central to the way the building society functions in the future. It's much more than just a tech replacement - it is a much wider transformational agenda for the society."