“OSB Group is undertaking a greenfield transformation to build the bank of the future.” Group Chief Transformation Officer Matt Baillie explains to Interface that the focus is on being cloud native, building a new data platform which underpins all of OSB’s regulatory reporting, as well as enabling it to migrate customers from legacy systems.
As part of that greenfield stack OSB is partnering with the best-in-class FinTechs, as well as some of the more traditional players, to enable it to bring IP in-house to own its application estate. This approach will enable it to fundamentally transform the savings and lending experience for customers, brokers, and colleagues across present and future products.
“We’re moving from being a traditional waterfall organisation to a scaled, agile business.” Baillie is 20 months into that transformation journey. When he joined OSB in 2022 he was working with a team of four, which subsequently scaled to a couple of hundred people supported by Publicis Sapient (and another third party), whilst building internal capability with a mix of best of breed hires from the market and internal talent transitioning to new roles.
OSB’s Modernisation Program
When Baillie took up his role in 2023 the Group was at a key inflection point. “Do we continue to do what we’ve always done and be bound by the same constraints of needing more humans to process the amount of work we do?” he reflects. “They would have limitations because of the technology stack as to how quickly we could respond to even basic events like rate changes This is where our transformation agenda was truly born.”
That agenda cleared a path for some key successes… “My first three months here was all about strategy and aligning to a North Star. Q2 was about onboarding the core vendors that were going to make up our future tech stack. In Q3 we focused on effectively mobilising engineering teams with appropriate OSB leadership. Q4 was then about testing and learning. Success at the end of the year was that we went live with our new core banking system, sat in the cloud with an MVP for colleagues with an instant access and fixed rate bond. We launched it as a savings account for Christmas, proving out our technology stack and testing the customer experience. The foundations built in 2023 have enabled us to industrialise what we’ve built and launch to the public.”
Continuous Improvement
Baillie believes OSB would not have made the progress it has to date had it taken a different approach. “The amount of work we’re undertaking and the scope of delivery we’re aiming for would not have been possible with a waterfall approach,” he says. “It would have taken years to map out what we’re doing. Therefore, by taking an agile approach, it’s enabled us to get going. We’re prioritising the most important chunks of work to build confidence on our transformation journey.”
OSB and Publicis Sapient – Partnering for Progress
“They’ve been instrumental in our progress,” says Baillie of the key support offered by Publicis Sapient during the Group’s transformation program. “We began with four people at OSB mobilising the program. And were quickly supported by leaders from Publicis Sapient across each of their SPEED disciplines (Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, Data & AI). They were part of the strategy phase. When we moved to mobilisation, they were offering up thought leadership in the product construct. Moreover, they were actually leading some of those work streams linked to their delivery capability. What differentiates them in my mind is their engineering skills. Their engineers are working side-by-side with us, driving the business transformation.”
