By Laura Hyde |
UK-based building society Nationwide has rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot across its workforce to deliver better experiences and outcomes for its 19 million members.
During the roll out, Nationwide replaced “decades-old” core banking systems, moved services to the cloud and rebuilt customer data, as well as bringing Virgin Money into the group as part of a takeover (completed in April 2026). This was carried out while keeping banking experiences steady for members.
“We have to do it where people don’t even know it’s happened,” said Paul Ballard, chief technology officer at Nationwide. “We don’t disrupt your life.”
Ballard says 15 million customer records have already been moved from Nationwide’s former core banking engine with the building society, which has 605 branches across the UK. It is also gearing up to integrate a further five million Virgin Money customers. The building society has consolidated 19 separate data stores serving different teams and purposes onto Microsoft Azure and Azure Databricks to create one unified cloud-based data platform.
Copilot is also supporting finance teams across the business, where 1,000 employees with premium licences are using it to turn rough notes into first drafts, summarise meetings, shape messages, pull actions from discussions, and help teams work across both Nationwide and Virgin Money. In a recent internal poll, 46 per cent of finance respondents said they used Copilot every working day, with 36 per cent using it several times a week.
Nationwide has around 2,500 engineers using GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI for generative AI use cases and Microsoft technologies such as Azure AI Foundry as part of future agent development.
“We’re moving to the phase where we’re working with Microsoft technology so we can start to create agents that can talk to our systems,” said Ballard. “We need to make sure we come out of integration modern, innovative and future fit.”
Read the full story on the Microsoft UK website.