Nationwide and OpenWrks to support members facing financial difficulty

By Megha Bhattacharya

Nationwide is partnering with OpenWrks, a UK based provider of open banking applications, to help members facing financial difficulty. Nationwide members in financial hardship are able to benefit from the technology, which enables them to digitally build a picture of their financial circumstances with ease, prior to having a meaningful conversation with one of Nationwide’s Collections and Recoveries team. This can lead to a reduction in the time it takes for a member to get to the right outcome and reduces the potential worry and stress.

Claire Tracey, Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer: “As a mutual, we believe in the power of partnership and that we can achieve more together than we can alone. Going live is the culmination of nearly 18 months’ collaboration between Nationwide and OpenWrks. Our agile approach and innovative thinking have helped us make a complicated process simple for members in difficult circumstances, all while supporting our colleagues who help them.”

Recently, Nationwide teamed up with FinTech Form3 in a bid to connect to its cloud-native payments platform and simplify the former’s payments infrastructure. Form3’s technology is expected to enable the Society to use a secure cloud-native payments infrastructure. The platform is also designed with flexibility in mind, making for easier implementation of new rules and standards as well as increasing the speed of deployment for new features and payments functionality.

Steve Bradford, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of OpenWrks: “Our partnership with Nationwide extends back to their Open Banking for Good programme where we focused on how to help customers better understand their finances at a time when they are in financial difficulty. Our primary consideration has been to ensure that members interests come first, resulting in a digital customer experience that enables them to work out what they can afford before speaking to an advisor. The combined knowledge and experience of both teams has resulted in a journey that removes some of the stress from the situation and helps members feel more comfortable throughout the process.”