Interview: Jem Walters, CTO, Vanquis
Jem Walters grew to become chief know-how officer (CTO) at banking group Vanquis in September 2023 after scratching an itch. Having spent 23 years with Virgin Cash, latterly as CIO, he needed to attempt his hand at entrepreneurship. He co-founded the profitable money-saving app Snoop, which Vanquis purchased in July 2023.
Whereas Walters had scratched his itch and learnt a lot within the course of, the acquisition created a possibility to return to the company facet as CTO at Vanquis. The banking group, shaped in 1880 and often called Provident Monetary till 2023, had a legacy IT problem. Senior executives believed Walters might assist the enterprise overcome these issues.
“I’d already been by means of that course of as soon as in my profession when Virgin Cash purchased Northern Rock in 2012,” says Walters, reflecting on the chance. “I wasn’t 100% certain it’s what I needed to do subsequent in my profession.”
After a dialog with the senior staff, he rapidly modified his thoughts. Now, two-and-a-half years later, he’s glad he did.
“What we’re embarking on and what we’ve delivered during the last couple of years has been exceptional by way of know-how transformation,” he says. “I’ve such staff right here – so dedicated and skilful. They’re a pleasure to work with. It’s simply good to be right here, and I’m actually having fun with the problem.”
Grabbing the chance
The problem Walters faces is simple on paper – combining his experiences of coping with legacy IT together with his consciousness of enterprise-grade agile improvement at Snoop. After all, coping with a problem in actual life is way tougher than describing the method on paper. As he started engaged on the duty at hand at Vanquis, a number of key questions grew to become obvious.
“Can we transfer to a digital working mannequin?” he says. “And culturally, actually from a know-how and alter perspective, can we begin to suppose, behave and work extra like a giant fintech than a small financial institution? And in order that’s a giant a part of the tradition that I’m making an attempt to drive right here. Can we get extra entrepreneurial? Can we be extra fleet of foot? Can we enhance our pace to market? In the end, that’s what we have to do to compete on this market.”
FTSE-listed Vanquis is a specialist financial institution that gives bank cards and loans to greater than 1.7 million UK debtors and savers whose private monetary circumstances can imply they’re usually excluded from mainstream banks. The organisation provides a variety of bank cards and financial savings merchandise, in addition to the cash administration app Snoop and specialist automobile finance by means of Moneybarn. Walters recognises the enterprise is a posh mix.
“In banks which have been round for many years, know-how is essentially organised in product silos. That’s true in lots of companies I’ve seen over time, and that was actually true at Vanquis. From an in-house manufacturing perspective, we had three disparate legacy know-how stacks – one for bank cards, one for automobile finance and one for private loans,” he says.
“Over time, you would possibly make one good choice at a time, however the know-how will get fairly difficult, and it’s tough to keep up and alter, and upgrades get deprioritised for brand new enterprise launches or no matter. Our imaginative and prescient was, ‘Okay, let’s pivot to a customer-centric knowledge mannequin. Let’s digitise the enterprise by way of how we service prospects’.”
Digitising the enterprise
Walters says his bold transformation programme has 4 key pillars. First, Gateway, which he describes because the core enterprise platform that covers all the things for servicing the financial institution’s prospects and offering them with merchandise.
“We’re consolidating all the things right into a Salesforce stack,” he says, suggesting the corporate makes use of a variety of the know-how large’s services and products. “We’ve stated, ‘Let’s be sure that if we will do one thing in Salesforce, we’ll do it’, and we’ve developed a powerful strategic partnership there.”
As a second pillar, Vanquis is remodeling its knowledge atmosphere. “We’re constructing a single supply of the reality, which is well-governed and has all the right knowledge governance in place, within the sense of knowledge dictionaries, lineage, single enterprise house owners and the definitions of metrics,” says Walters. The info platform is constructed on Snowflake know-how.
“We’re constructing a single supply of the reality, which is well-governed and has all the right knowledge governance in place”
Jem Walters, Vanquis
The third pillar covers the fashionable office atmosphere. Vanquis used disparate know-how stacks, with workers having completely different e mail deal with codecs throughout a number of Microsoft tenants.
“Collaboration didn’t fairly work; doc sharing didn’t work,” he says. “So, we’ve bought everybody on a single tenant and upgraded the laptops and working techniques.”
The ultimate pillar is shared companies. For instance, Walters says Vanquis used three separate human assets techniques.
“So, let’s convey that into one platform,” he says, including that Vanquis now makes use of Dayforce HR know-how. The corporate can also be consolidating monitoring and logging through Sumo Logic, managing safety operations through Rapid7, and goals to refresh its IT service administration strategy this yr.
“These are the 4 pillars,” says Walters. “There aren’t many stones that aren’t being left unturned. And we’re making actually good progress throughout all of them.”
Pursuing digital transformation
Delivering digital transformation has concerned a methodical course of. Whereas good progress was being made earlier than Walters joined, he’s centered on creating an implementation technique.
“It’s about working backwards from proper to left,” he says. “A giant-bang strategy is simply not possible. You may’t transfer two million prospects over in an hour. It’s an excessive amount of threat, so we had to determine a mechanism to implement know-how incrementally after which migrate buyer knowledge the place wanted.”
One essential a part of this shift has been knowledge consolidation. Walters’ staff developed an idea referred to as the shopper kernel file, making a single operational view of shoppers utilizing the Salesforce platform, with 2.4 million information from 15 completely different knowledge sources. Walters recognises that making a single buyer view isn’t a one-time hit. New shoppers should be onboarded, and adjustments to the Salesforce file should synchronise with the remaining legacy techniques.
Nonetheless, as soon as the brand new Gateway system went stay final February, his staff discovered it a lot simpler to convey techniques and processes into the know-how stack.
“As a proof level, a month later, we moved all our complaints processing onto the Salesforce stack, and we bought 1,500 operation centre brokers moved throughout, and that every one went very well,” he says.
“The shift to Gateway was the important thing to unlocking our implementation technique, which implies we will now ship extra outdated blocks of processes at a time, after which simply prepare individuals up to do this explicit a part of the enterprise. That’s now a rolling programme of labor.”
Boosting cell experiences
Walters says digital transformation continues apace. Vanquis not too long ago launched its new app, a course of that features migrating 1,000,000 prospects and loading greater than 30 billion rows of buyer, product and decisioning knowledge onto the platform underpinning the software program.
“One of many good issues we did was to get the Snoop staff to construct the brand new Vanquis banking app,” he says. “That strategy was a little bit of a no brainer for me, as a result of we spent 5 years at Snoop constructing apps, and we grew to become good at understanding what you must do to construct a digital enterprise.”
That studying course of was essential as a result of Walters suggests constructing banking apps is way from simple. Drawing on the talents of the inner Snoop staff helped preserve prices in examine. The method, which incorporates measuring and monitoring efficiency, additionally supplied a case research on agile improvement strategies for the remainder of the enterprise.
“That strategy has been actually helpful, and it paves the way in which for one thing that we’re going to embark on later this yr, which is to begin to combine the Snoop-style cash administration options into the Vanquis banking app expertise – and that’s the place issues begin to get actually attention-grabbing, as a result of I don’t suppose anybody else within the UK has cracked that nut,” he says.
Different ongoing transformation efforts embrace bank card onboarding, the place Walters’ staff has constructed a brand new platform. This platform will give the enterprise entry to higher decisioning techniques, improved threat and fraud administration capabilities, and extra knowledge sources for affordability assessments. The Gateway transformation entails two extra key milestones.
“One is bringing collections and forbearance processes onto the brand new stack,” he says. “The final piece of the jigsaw is constructing a brand new automobile finance platform, which we’re effectively underway with. All of these issues must be full this yr. There’s rather a lot happening.”
Enhancing personalisation
Walters says Vanquis will proceed to hone its cell app in the course of the subsequent two years. The intention is to make use of the in-house design staff to construct an ideal buyer expertise. He paints an image of the agency’s future cash administration app.
“Will probably be simple to do your banking,” he says. “We may have agentic AI, so – in case you can’t self-serve within the app – the chat performance will let you do anything that you just need to do, and also you gained’t have to talk to a human in case you don’t need to, or chat with a human, however that possibility will at all times be accessible.”
The overall route of journey, suggests Walters, is hyper-personalisation. He expects the financial institution to proceed creating new merchandise in key areas, reminiscent of bettering creditworthiness and offering credit score amenities. The intention is to assist Vanquis prospects see all their services and products in a single place and to allow as a lot self-service as attainable.
“Via Snoop and the connectivity with different financial institution accounts and bank cards, we will present a hyper-personalised service. We’ve already confirmed we will try this and assist prospects get monetary savings. And that’s not essentially by means of merchandise that we manufacture or promote, however by means of the value comparability functionality that we’ve in Snoop,” he says.
“So, whether or not it’s your power, broadband, cell phone or insurance coverage, we may also help. And that strategy begins to sound attention-grabbing and unrecognisable from the enterprise I joined two or three years in the past.”
