Modernizing payments via cloud migration

Call for change

Nationwide, the largest building society in the UK with more than £230 billion in group assets, has embarked on a journey to modernize its payments infrastructure and adopt a cloud-native platform. The Society—which processes 450 million retail transactions each year—expects its payments volumes to grow by 20% a year.

With exponential growth in cashless payments and Faster Payments (a UK banking-industry initiative enabling real-time payments) in recent years, Nationwide needed a resilient, cost-efficient solution that would evolve alongside its business. It also wanted to gear up for the New Payments Architecture—an ISO 20022-compliant retail payment infrastructure platform from the UK payments operator and standards body Pay.UK.

The transformation program kicked off in 2018, when Nationwide conducted an in-depth analysis of its requirements and started scanning the market for a solution. After considering a locally hosted installation, it opted instead for a cloud-based account-to-account platform provided by Form3 and subsequently appointed Accenture as the technology consulting partner for the program.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Nationwide selected a new payments system based on the Form3 solution hosted on AWS's multi-tenant cloud. The Form3 account-to-account platform connects financial institutions to payment schemes such as Faster Payments and BACS, and enables them to future-proof operations against regulatory changes such as ISO 20022.

Form3, an Accenture partner that provides an enterprise-grade payment technology platform on the cloud, offers native integration with AWS. This helps to simplify and speed up migration. Accenture and Form3 are collaborating closely throughout this program, building on their well-established partnership.

Drawing on its cloud expertise, Accenture helped Nationwide to review the functional, technical and delivery capabilities required to modernize its payments environment and transition to the cloud. This included building cloud-based development environments and tooling as well as embracing DevOps and agile development principles and practices.

Nationwide worked with Accenture to deliver a minimum viable service (MVS) which enabled the delivery of the first cloud-based payment ‘single-penny transaction’. The MVS was completed within five months in 2022 and involved the integration of Nationwide’s technology stack with Faster Payments and Form3.

A valuable difference

Accenture’s team of experienced payments, data and cloud professionals is working with Nationwide to lay a robust cloud foundation with AWS cloud infrastructure. Nationwide is currently migrating inbound single immediate payments volumes from a near-real-time on-premise platform to the Form3 cloud without impacting live services and scheme settlement.