Nationwide Building Society creating digital platform with fintech 10x

Nationwide Building Society is planning to launch a current account for small businesses in partnership with fintech 10x Technologies.

A company founded when the Corn Laws were being repealed is remaining relative in the digital age through fintech partnership. Nationwide has invested heavily in tech over the last decade to bring its IT up to date and has not looked back with funky apps and capabilities offered to its customers.

It is now targeting 5.7 million small businesses with an account that will bring the fintech experiences to small business banking. To this end Nationwide has invested £15m in 10x Future Technologies was set up by former Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins.

Because Nationwide doesn’t have a business current account, it is building the service from scratch.

The building society has been working with 10x for over six months on ideas around the account. It wants it to be incredibly user friendly. For example the cloud based platform will enable businesses to access their account and associated products and services through both a mobile app and online banking.

Fintech 10x was building a digital bank for Virgin bank until the contract, which had already cost the bank £38m, was scrapped when it was acquired by Clydesdale and Yorkshire Group.

Nationwide CEO Joe Garner said: “Like us, 10x is aiming to massively improve service in financial services and are therefore a natural partner.”

Meanwhile Antony Jenkins, founder of 10x Future Technologies, said: “Nationwide is one of the UK’s most trusted and service-centric brands and our digital delivery team looks forward to supporting the Society in setting new standards in business banking – just as good digitally as it is in branch.”

Lloyds Banking Group is another example of a major traditional bank investing in fintechs to get access to latest technology. It is a shareholder of Thought Machine, which is also supplying it with a cloud based core banking platform.