Nationwide races into the payments future

The banking sector has been transforming over the past two decades. Digital platforms are now central to banking operations and the customer need for quick and easy digital payments is greater than ever. Today, cloud technologies are enabling banks to adapt to this rapidly changing market, equipping them with the type of flexibility and agility usually synonymous with fintech startups.

With its payments processing accounting for over 5% of the UK's Faster Payments Service (FPS) volume, Nationwide needed exactly this kind of flexibility to keep up with demand. Together, we set out to build a next generation payments hub for Nationwide, enabled by AWS and Form3 (a cloud-based payment technology provider).

The innovative new cloud platform – hosted on AWS using an API and microservices-based architecture – is a game-changer for Nationwide. It is designed to be fully resilient, secure, and hyper-scalable. With automated and continuous building, testing and deployment of code changes and high observability, the new payments hub has also improved the user experience for Nationwide’s operations team, and given them far greater levels of control.

Our modern engineering and flexible migration approach that can be executed in just two hours has enabled Nationwide payments to ramp up from 4,000 to 400,000 payments – low to full volume – and with zero outages, laying a powerful foundation for migrations of future payment types.

Taking banking to new heights

Nationwide’s focus on strong delivery leadership and governance, combined with the right systems integration, payments, and cloud partnerships, have also been pivotal to its success.

Together, we created a robust controls framework with over 500 unique controls, instilling confidence in the payments hub and ensuring it complies with payments regulations. In addition, new user-friendly dashboards track the health and service statistics of the payments hub to ensure it’s always running optimally – and if it’s not, Nationwide can react before members notice.

This combination of leading engineering techniques, greater system visibility and rigorous change practices is set to take Nationwide banking to new heights.

Delivering market leading customer experiences

Nationwide has successfully migrated inbound Single Immediate Payments (SIPs) – faster payments between external banks and Nationwide accounts – as well as inbound Standing Order Payments (SOPs), while also ensuring the system can handle sudden spikes in payment demand.

This smart, automated cloud platform scales Nationwide’s payment processing volumes from 200 transactions per second to 500 transactions per second when required, helping Nationwide optimize infrastructure consumption. For Nationwide members, the new and improved platform delivers an uninterrupted and seamless banking service, capable of handling more than one million transactions per day and a projected 15% annual increase in FPS volumes.

Together, we are continuing to build Nationwide’s remaining payment types. Thanks to the engineering and migration strategy we have set in place, Nationwide can confidently manage this expansion with zero deployment downtime.

Nationwide now has the modern FPS capabilities it needs to fulfil its ambitions and continue creating innovative and market leading banking experiences for its members today, and in the future.