Product descriptions:
Managing £367.9 billion in assets and returning £2.8 billion in value to their members, Nationwide Building Society is a critical player in the UK’s financial infrastructure. As a member-focused mutual, Nationwide set out to enable richer personalization and deliver enhanced experiences to their members. At the heart of this evolution is the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which was implemented in just 12 months and consolidates multiple data warehouses into a single governed platform. This unified foundation is designed to unlock richer insights and accelerate innovation across the Nationwide organization.
This transition marks a step forward in how Nationwide harnesses data as a strategic asset. The new lakehouse architecture enhances Nationwide’s ability to deliver personalized products and services, further strengthens the protection of member data and empowers teams with trusted insights to drive smarter decisions. The lakehouse architecture helps Nationwide to further develop as a modern, data-forward organization ready for the future.
When financial data is fragmented, trust suffers
As the world’s largest building society, Nationwide serves over 24.5 million customers across the UK. Last year, Nationwide returned a record £2.8 billion in value to their members. “We’re not a bank. We’re a building society that operates on mutuality. When we do well, our customers and members benefit,” Sri Kanisapakkam, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Nationwide, explained. Their customer-first model drives the need for modern, data-driven services.
With over 24 million customers, each with their own needs, personalization is a top priority. Nationwide recognizes the need for real-time, relevant messaging and service to customers. “We’re using behavioral data to predict what they might need next,” Sri said.
Nationwide supports over 5,000 internal users with insights via Power BI dashboards. “Analyzing abnormal patterns is increasingly driven by data. Plus, we’re powering operational reporting across the organization,” Nitin Kulkarni, CIO for Data and AI at Nationwide, said. “Whether it’s regulatory reporting, financial analytics or customer service and marketing initiatives, our teams rely on timely, trusted data.”
With a clear strategic vision and a strong foundation in delivering value to their members, Nationwide saw an opportunity to elevate customer experiences through data-driven insights. Recognizing that unlocking this potential required a new approach, the team mobilized around a bold transformation agenda. At the time, Nationwide’s data was distributed across multiple technologies. “We had a customer-centric business strategy, and we needed a data estate that matched that ambition,” Sri said.
Sri explained, “We needed a single source of truth for customer data, a technology that better enabled our data governance strategy and championed transparency of ownership and lineage. These were the essential ingredients for delivering personalization and fraud prevention quickly and consistently. We also recognized the need for a streamlined infrastructure — one that drives operational efficiency, promotes collaborations and enables innovation to scale. Our technology needed to provide an accessible way to explore new use cases.”
With demand for data growing across every line of business, Nationwide made a bold decision: to consolidate their data estate and build a unified, cloud-agnostic foundation for analytics and AI. This led to the adoption of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, enabling the organization to further streamline data pipelines, promote collaboration and accelerate innovation across their most critical business use cases.
Building a unified foundation for trusted data with the Databricks Platform
In just 12 months, Nationwide successfully migrated 17 of their 19 data warehouses to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, laying the foundation for a unified, scalable ecosystem. “It was about accelerating our journey to becoming a data-forward organization,” Sri said. “So, we chose the Databricks Platform.”
Nationwide selected Databricks for its open architecture and cloud-agnostic flexibility, and for its ability to support diverse workloads across batch and streaming, enabling consistent performance across use cases. “We needed a platform that could serve every persona and work across multiple cloud providers,” Sri said. “Databricks gave us that optionality.”
Nationwide has already begun investing in multicloud architecture, initially building their new enterprise lakehouse on Azure Databricks and preparing to expand to AWS. “Our aim is to demonstrate resiliency and recovery capabilities that go beyond what’s currently available in the market,” Nitin said. The architecture combines the reliability of a traditional warehouse with the flexibility of a data lake — a core principle of the lakehouse model.
Critically, it integrates with dbt Labs, their transformation tool of choice, to enable ELT (extract, load, transform) practices. They also benefit from Databricks’ deep integration with Microsoft as a first-party Azure service. This makes it easier to align platform deployment with internal security, identity and compliance standards, accelerating deployment and reducing overheads.
Nationwide uses Unity Catalog as the backbone of their data governance framework, enabling fine-grained access control and ensuring trust, transparency and compliance for every tagged dataset. “Every dataset we create has a snapshot of PII and non-PII,” Sri said. “That way, we can give the right people the right level of access.” Meanwhile, model development is managed with MLflow, and real-time data processing is done through Delta Lake, Structured Streaming and automated workflows. Nitin added, “Our ML models — whether for fraud, personalization or marketing — are being centralized in Databricks. This will help us move from scheduled insights to real-time execution.”
This clear governance model has helped accelerate adoption across Nationwide’s 5,000+ internal data consumers. With the help of AI/BI Genie, Databricks’ natural language interface, nontechnical users in finance, risk and marketing can ask questions of the data and receive insights in seconds.
Unlocking confidence and scale to better serve customers
Nationwide’s transformation has made the organization even more data-informed. “One of the biggest challenges when you’re going through a tech transformation is taking your stakeholders on that journey. Databricks helped us build confidence with both users and stakeholders by providing transparent lineage and a well-governed product,” Sri explained. “We’ve got many more years to come on our transformation journey, so knowing we’ve got a platform that executives and teams trust is instrumental.”
By consolidating 17 of 19 legacy warehouses and centralizing over 3,000 daily data feeds into the lakehouse, Nationwide has dramatically reduced their data surface area, making it easier to deliver accurate and timely insights, all without sacrificing control or compliance. In fact, this consolidation has unlocked access to nearly 70% of trusted data sources, with 15% of these sources driving real-time decision-making.
“Databricks enables all kinds of personas and use cases to deliver quickly, but also in a scalable environment,” Nitin said. “In the past, tools couldn’t meet every need, so the tech stack grew complex. With Databricks, we finally have a platform that can give people answers to all their problems.”
Their focus is now turned to operationalizing AI at scale. As the team advances their journey on Databricks, they plan to shift from scheduled batch execution to real-time scoring. As Nitin explained, “Today, many of our models run monthly or quarterly. Our goal is to execute them more frequently so we can deliver faster, smarter decisions for our members.”
Another key initiative is the launch of an internal data marketplace — a central hub to help teams discover, access and reuse trusted data and AI assets. This will further reduce any duplication, speed up experimentation and drive value across departments. They are also exploring how Databricks can support IT automation, colleague experience and customer journeys. By integrating alert data, logging data and internal system signals into the lakehouse, the team hopes to streamline everything from change management to incident response.
With the Databricks Platform, and strategic partners like Microsoft and dbt Labs, Nationwide is future-proofing their data and AI foundation for the years ahead, enabling smarter decisions, faster innovation and better service for their customers.