Experian has today announced a new partnership with Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest building society.

The three year partnership will focus on supporting Nationwide’s risk management activities in the modelling of credit risk, capital adequacy and provisioning. 

This will include helping them deliver tailored credit decisions for good outcomes that are right for the specific circumstances of each customer.

Iain Laing, Chief Risk Officer at Nationwide, said: “It was imperative that we found the right partner to work with us.  The expertise that the Experian teams already have in helping to address these kinds of challenges and their knowledge of the UK credit market, played a key role in our decision.  We are confident that they will help us create more efficient strategies to overcome economic uncertainty and regulatory complexity.”

Paul Russell, Director Analytical Solutions at Experian, said: “Over recent years, developments in the regulation of the banking sector have brought into sharper focus the need to have a deeper understanding of customer behaviour and its relationship to portfolio health in a changing economy.  Moves to bring into closer alignment the estimation of credit risk, expected loss and unexpected loss through, for example, changes to provisioning regulations (IFRS9) are placing demands on many lenders’ credit risk management teams.  We are delighted to be able to support Nationwide in meeting these challenges.”

Experian will be providing a scalable team of analysts and consultants with domain expertise and credit risk modelling capacity to support Nationwide’s existing credit risk management activities. Nationwide will be able to easily scale resources as necessary to meet the demands of regulation, as well as business priorities.

For Nationwide, the new partnership means that they will be able to:

• deliver even better consumer outcomes by ensuring the credit risk assessment systems are kept up to date
• deliver greater value for their members through a more cost efficient resource model
• ensure the continued safety and soundness of the Society through robust management of risks facing the Nationwide business
• easily scale their credit risk modelling capabilities in response to business priorities
• ensure compliance with relevant regulations, including stress testing and Basel III.

Nationwide carried out extensive due diligence to find a partner that would give them the expertise, and scale needed to support Nationwide as its business grows and it works to meet the increasing and complex regulatory requirements that all lenders are facing.