Turning Processes into AI Superpowers: How Nationwide Built the Foundation for Connected, Governed Processes

Meet our customer

Nationwide is the world’s largest building society, serving more than 19 million members and more than 25,000 employees across the United Kingdom. As the Public Public second largest provider of mortgages and retail deposits in the UK, Nationwide has earned recognition as the Which? Banking brand of the year 2025 and the UK’s best bank in the Forbes World’s Best Banks 2026 list. At its core, Nationwide is committed to banking that is fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society.

Fragmented to Connected: The Power of Unified Process Intelligence

Nationwide’s relationship with ARIS began over a decade ago with a clear business challenge: the building society didn’t understand how it’s interconnected and everything fits together. Teams across Nationwide had conducted process mapping exercises and created documentation, but the outputs existed in isolation – Visios, Powerpoints, Miroboards scattered across various Sharepoints and team folders.

“We had done process mapping, but we weren’t able to put those pieces together,” explains Edel Hindley, Process Governance Manager “One team would be doing fantastic work, delivering great impact, but there was no standard way to tell the people on the other side of the building what they were doing. We needed better understanding of how everything fitted in together.

ARIS was brought in to solve this fundamental problem: to provide visibility into the relationships and connectivity that held the building society together.

Rediscovering Process as the Engine of the Organization

In 2022, the leadership recognised that something was fundamentally wrong. “We had identified that there were too many issues in our process flow,” says Hindley. “Everyone was doing the right thing, following protocol, but because they were working in silos without visibility across the society, it was possible tasks could be missed.”Public Public Regulatory bodies and the media highlighted customer challenges and events that shouldn’t have happened. The building society had become reactive rather than proactive, but the solution wasn’t more tools or more rules – it was clarity.

Nationwide re-energized its commitment to process management and:

• Established a formal Process Ownership Framework to create accountability and governance
• Built a unified Process Library accessible to more than 25,000 employees via SSO
• Expanded specialised roles including Process Owners and Activity Leads to drive consistency
• Integrated process models with risks and controls to embed oversight into operations

The shift was deliberate: from ad-hoc process management to structured, governed, interconnected process intelligence.

From Visibility to Measurable Business Impact

Today, ARIS serves as the central repository for how Nationwide operates. But it’s far more than a process documentation tool.

“We use ARIS as a repository of our processes and how they operate, making it available to everyone,” says Hindley. “We can see the relationships between different parts of the society, and understand which teams are involved in each process. We can see what data and what systems a process needs to work. That connectivity is incredibly powerful.”

This connected view enables Nationwide to improve operational resilience by demonstrating compliance with regulatory requirements for business continuity and recovery, drive risk and control integration by embedding governance directly into workflows, and support regulatory reporting including the critical Operational Continuity in Resolution requirements mandated by the Bank of England since 2009.

The most tangible outcome has been the real improvement in how we deal with customer operations and the accompanying reduction in issues. “We’ve seen a real improvement in operations and remediation problems have significantly shrunk,” says Hindley. “Not solely because of ARIS, but wider process ownership Public Public and process management has certainly been a key enabler of that success. Regulators have been very happy with our outcomes and progress.”

Preparing for the AI Era

Looking ahead, Nationwide recognises that ARIS positions the organisation perfectly for the next phase of transformation: intelligent automation and agentic AI.

“We’ve spent time getting to understand our processes and how they flow,” explains Hindley. “We’ve put them into ARIS. Now we’re layering mining tools, blueprint tools, and other advanced capabilities on top. When you put AI on top of that foundation – on top of understanding how everything is designed to operate – everything changes. You’ve got everything you need. It should be incredible.”

By placing process intelligence at the heart of its AI strategy, Nationwide is positioning itself not just to automate work, but to transform how the building society operates—with greater consistency, visibility, and customer impact.

Nationwide’s journey demonstrates a critical truth: organizations that scale AI successfully aren’t those with the most advanced AI models. They’re the ones that have invested in understanding their operations first – and built the governance structures to ensure that understanding remains consistent and current.