When Debra Bailey joined OSB Group taking up the role of Chief Information Officer in January 2025, she entered an organisation already deep into a major transformation journey – undertaking a greenfield transformation to build the bank of the future…
To develop its greenfield stack, the Group has been partnering with best-in-class FinTechs, and some traditional players, whilst building their own capabilities to enable them to design and develop their future estate. This approach is fundamental in transforming the savings and lending experience for customers, brokers, and colleagues across present and future products.
Uniting Transformation and Core Technology
The Group’s transformation programme was initially launched separately from the core technology of the organisation.
“I think the decision to kick off transformation in a completely separate greenfield way was the right thing to do,” says Debra. “If you tried to do it from within a technology organisation that had its own challenges and ways of working, it would have been like pouring oil on water.”
That separation gave the transformation team the freedom to design differently, build mindfully and adopt a new operating model. But once platforms become operational, Debra argues, the picture changed.
“Once you’ve got hundreds of millions of pounds and nearly half a million customers onboarded, you can’t run two technology organisations completely separately,” she says. “They all have to come together so that you’ve got the same disciplines, the same policies and standards covering the breadth of what you’re doing.”
Building a Lending Platform for Speed and Scale
Faced with fragmented legacy systems after years of acquisitive growth, the Group rebuilt its lending engine from front to back – unifying product configuration, underwriting, servicing, and broker interaction on a single modern platform. With the support of Publicis Sapient, the platform has been live since 2025, enabling faster product launches, significantly reduced cycle times, and order‑of‑magnitude efficiency gains in core lending operations.
A key part of the Group’s transformation, the new lending platform serves a core business need across Buy To Let, with residential and commercial mortgages to come.
Debra has worked on mortgage platform transformation before but notes the Group’s approach has been different. “We haven’t just put in a new platform,” she says. “We’ve looked at the end-to-end process.” A necessity when meeting the challenge of market adoption when launching a new mortgage brand.
Partnering with Publicis Sapient
Publicis Sapient has played an important role in the Group’s transformation journey since its inception with the early architecture and delivery of the programme dating back to 2022 when they initiated a front-to-back modernisation, not just incremental fixes.
“They architected this overall proposed platform and the FinTechs that we work with,” Debra says. “It’s a very logical and open architecture.”
Allied to this, OSB has been working with Publicis Sapient to further build its own capability. Debra says the organisation is developing software engineering strength, particularly in India, while retaining product, value stream, engineering and delivery leadership in the UK. “We’re continually working with Publicis Sapient to transfer the knowledge and build those key skills in OSB Group.”
As a valued partner bringing innovation to the Group, Debra sees Publicis Sapient further supporting their journey to provide capacity where it would not make sense for OSB Group to build permanent internal scale for peak delivery demand. “We recognise that PS have been instrumental in providing flexibility and we will continue to lean on their support when it comes to ramping capacity.”
About OSB Group
OSB Group is a leading specialist mortgage lender, primarily focused on carefully selected sub-segments of the mortgage market such as Buy to Let, Residential, complex commercial and semi-commercial, development finance, bridging and asset finance.
The OSB Group is made up of a family of specialist financial services business. The Group operates under brands that serve distinct audiences and needs, including Rely, Precise, InterBay, InterBay Asset Finance, Heritable Development Finance, Charter Savings Bank, and Kent Reliance.