Case Study: Nationwide Building Society grows loan portfolio and profitability with FICO Blaze Advisor

World’s largest building society grows loan portfolio and profitability

Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society with 15 million members and over £190 billion in assets, faced a 20‑year‑old loan decision platform that was locked into a single outsourced credit bureau. That legacy setup caused nightly downtime, limited access to data, slow responses to market and regulatory changes, and constrained loan volumes and competitiveness.

Nationwide built a Strategic Risk Infrastructure using FICO Blaze Advisor to enable in‑house rule changes, multi‑bureau data sourcing and true 24/7 processing. The new system has driven millions of pounds in additional loans (including 750+ night applications), cut application times (to as little as ~5 minutes for good customers) and abandonment (~17%), is projected to enable up to £50m more loans a year, saves about £2m in bureau costs over five years, and reduced pricing-change lead time from ten days to roughly 24–48 hours.

Nationwide Building Society

Mark Tuton

Senior Risk Manager