The Intermediary – November 2025 - Flipbook - Page 28
In Profile.
Q&A
Jessica O’Connor speaks with Martin Boyle, chief operating
officer at West Brom Building Society, about the mutual’s
ongoing digital transformation
M
artin Boyle has built a
career around leading
transformation. He began on
the consulting side, helping
major retail banks navigate
technological change. “I eventually decided that
I’d spent a lot of time giving advice, now I’d try and
actually deliver something,” he recalls. That took
him into senior leadership roles across the sector,
including more than a decade at Nationwide.
As chief operating officer at West Brom Building
Society, Boyle is drawing on that experience to
help guide one of the country’s oldest building
societies through a new era.
Upgrades are costly, slow and disruptive. By
contrast, newer cloud-native platforms offer
what he describes as an “evergreen” model. “We
benefit from the avoided cost of having to take big
upgrades,” he adds. “We get huge flexibility […]
whether for better fraud detection, better identity
management, or better servicing.”
The transformation aims to give customers a
faster and more intuitive way to manage their
money, while preserving the security and trust
that define the West Brom brand. Customers will
be able to self-service everyday updates such as
changing their name or address, while still having
secure, direct communication with the society
through the app. “We’re building security and
resilience right at the centre of it,” Boyle adds.
Digital transformation
For Boyle, the timing of West Brom’s digital
overhaul is no coincidence. “The building
society sector, with the exception of the
large ones, are a bit behind in the whole
digital agenda,” he says.
Customer expectations are changing
fast, shaped by experiences in other
industries where convenience and
immediacy have become the norm. As
Boyle warns: “You either digitise or die. You
won’t go out of business overnight, but over
time you will become increasingly irrelevant.”
That shift in expectations is what underpins
the West Brom’s transformation plans – a
comprehensive modernisation of both its systems
and its service model. Boyle points out that while
branches remain “fundamentally really important,”
the current technology limits what customers can do.
“We’ve put a ‘digital veneer’ on the front end,” he
says. “It still has a [Service Level Agreement (SLA)]
of nearly three days to open a savings account.
That will go to three minutes when we go live.”
The change, he explains, will deliver a “paradigm
shift” in speed, convenience and responsiveness,
without removing choice. Customers who prefer
face-to-face service will still have that option, but
those who want to transact quickly will be able to
do so through a fully digital experience.
Much of this, however, depends on tackling
legacy systems “built for a different era.” Older
systems, he notes, make it difficult to integrate
modern tools such as photo-based ID checks or
artificial intelligence (AI) fraud detection.
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The Intermediary | November 2025
Delivering change
MARTIN
BOYLE
When it came to selecting the
organisations that would help deliver
the digital transformation, Boyle
was determined to take a different
approach, he explains: “Typically, we
write big, thick requests for proposals
[…] where we try and write all the
requirements down. Then we send them out
to lots of organisations, but you’re no further
forward, because everybody says they can do
everything.” This time, he wanted proof, not
promises. “Very early on, I said you’ve got to put
your money where your mouth is – you’re going to
have to build me something. If you say this stuff is
as flexible as it is, prove it to me.”
That challenge produced an unexpected result.
Within just 10 weeks, Deloitte and 10x Banking
built a functional branded prototype. “It wasn’t
a full solution,” Boyle says. “But it was a very
powerful demonstration of the credibility of the
platform.”
After testing against several other market
options and detailed due diligence, the West Brom
opted to move forward with Deloitte and 10x.
Their existing integrations, strong technical track
record and ability to manage the service for up to
seven years provided confidence.
Boyle says: “Show me stuff rather than tell me
stuff. Then prove to me that you have got the
financial muscle and credentials to build it, and
the commercial savvy to run it.”
