Nationwide has worked with Microsoft to consolidate its data stores and migrate millions of customers off its core banking engine.

The building society has already migrated 15 million customers off its legacy banking platform onto a new cloud-based technology stack powered by Microsoft Azure. This has meant moving everything from customer records to card providers and branches to the cloud.

In a joint announcement with Microsoft, Nationwide announced it has consolidated 19 disparate data storage platforms serving various internal teams using Microsoft Azure and Azure Databricks.

“We wanted one unified platform that serves all of the data to the society in one place, on one technology, on the cloud,” said Sri Kanisapakkam, chief data and analytics officer at Nationwide.

As a result of the consolidation, Kanisapakkam added, Nationwide can provide its AI systems with easier access to both structured and unstructured data. This has allowed the building society to track customer journeys through recently acquired Virgin Money and to roll out a new AI-powered data tool, dubbed Talk to Data, for its executives.

Nationwide has used its new Microsoft partnership to expand its rollout of the tech giant’s AI tools. The building society said that around 1,000 of its finance workers now use the premium tier of Microsoft 365 Copilot, mainly to speed up fragmented and menial processes.

Internal polling at Nationwide found 46 per cent of respondents who worked in finance use Copilot every working day, primarily for faster drafting. In addition, around 2,500 engineers at Nationwide now use Microsoft services such as GitHub Copilot and Azure AI Foundry for code generation and agentic deployment.

---