MAKING CUSTOMERS CENTRAL TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

WRITTEN BY: ALEX CLERE

PRODUCED BY: MICHAEL BANYARD

In recent years, Yorkshire Building Society has undertaken a transformational journey –one that starts and ends with the customer

When Yorkshire Building Society’s (YBS) Chief Commercial Officer, David Morris, and Director of Business

Transformation, Ben Sampson, join me to discuss the seismic change that the mutual has enjoyed over the last five years, there’s more than 100 miles between them. Morris is joining from Oxfordshire in the south of England, while Sampson is dialling in from Halifax in the north. It’s a sign of the times – in business today, it’s not unusual for colleagues to be separated by postal codes, time zones or even oceans. But it’s also a mark of how far Yorkshire Building Society has come since it was founded in 1864.

YBS can trace its roots back more than 150 years to the Huddersfield Equitable Permanent Benefit Building Society, whose members would meet each morning from 5-8am – not on Zoom, but in a single room in the Yorkshire town. Early directors of the society included a dentist, a shoemaker and a plumber. At the end of the first year, there were just six borrowers and assets of around £4,000 – over £400,000 in today’s money.

The name itself stems from the West Yorkshire Building Society, which was founded two years later in Dewsbury –a short six-mile hop from the town of Huddersfield. For over 100 years, the two building societies operated in separate orbits – orbits that would rarely stray outside this small, 10-mile patch of northern England. In 1982, the West Yorkshire Building Society and the Huddersfield Building Society merged with another local mutual, the Bradford Building Society, to create the entity that exists today.

It is a history of consolidation: in the years after the merger, the newly rebranded Yorkshire Building Society would gradually accumulate more of its peers from across the UK, slowly increasing its sphere of influence and growing steadily in size. The Haywards Heath, Barnsley, Chelsea, and Norwich & Peterborough Building Societies were all subsumed into YBS and today the group has a balance book in excess of £55bn.

Is its Yorkshire heritage still important?

Being local and mutually owned means that Yorkshire Building Society is motivated by its members, not by a distant shareholder who they’ve never met. Everything that YBS does is for the service of its members.

“I don't actually think we are local at all anymore,” Morris says. “We've got a national branch network, a sophisticated digital footprint across all our brands and we've obviously got customers from all over the British Isles. We've got customers in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and a huge London presence.”

Instead of thinking local, YBS today thinks about local values. It has expanded far beyond Yorkshire’s borders, but the organisation is still proud of its heritage and is committed to upholding the traditional values that are said to define this beautiful part of the world: humanity, empathy, honesty, and a sense of doing the right thing.

“I’m a proud Yorkshireman. I'm a local lad,” says Ben Sampson. “I love coming to work at the Yorkshire Building Society because whilst we're national and we make a national impact, I think the culture and the roots of the business feel very Yorkshire. If you ask a Yorkshireman what they think about being from Yorkshire, they'll use words like openness, integrity, fairness and honesty – and I think we have a culture that really thrives on that.”

Yorkshire Fact File

• Historical area of northern England made up today of four counties

• Nearly 15,000km² ranging from peaks and dales to heritage coastline

• Major cities include Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Hull and York

• Renowned for its food and drink including strong tea, batter puddings, Wensleydale cheese, Pontefract liquorice, and its forced rhubarb

• Population according to the 2021 UK census: 5.5mn

BEN SAMPSON, MBA

TITLE: DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

INDUSTRY: FINANCIAL SERVICES

LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM

Ben began his career at HBOS and worked in various business areas until 2008 when Lloyds TSB took over during the financial crisis. At the newly formed Lloyds Banking Group Ben undertook significant roles in both the Integration and Verde (TSB creation) programmes. Since Joining YBS Ben has led a number of high profile programmes of work that have helped transform and modernise the society, such as the lending re-platforming work to move YBS to the IRESS MSO platform. In his current role as Director of Business Transformation, Ben is responsible for the strategic design, business case and planning of the YBS transformation. This includes overall sponsorship and ownership of the benefits and benefits for the programme and accountability to the Executive and board.