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Nationwide Building Society builds trust in data and improves compliance with Collibra and Databricks

Headquarters
United Kingdom
Employees
10,000+
Industry
Financial services and insurance
Customer since
2021

Since deploying Collibra as the foundation of its data governance program, the UK’s Nationwide Building Society has transformed data management automation, enabling faster and more efficient assessment of data use, traceability and quality

Goal

Targeting better compliance

Data is foundational to Nationwide, the world's largest building society. From enhancing the customer experience for its 19 million members to preventing fraud, improving business efficiency and driving AI-based innovation, data sits at the heart of Nationwide’s operations. Since its acquisition of Virgin Money, Nationwide now touches the lives of one in three people in the UK. The Building Society is now the second-largest provider of mortgages and retail deposits, alongside products and services such as current accounts, credit cards, personal loans and business banking.

Over the last few years, Nationwide has set out to simplify and transform its data footprint. Complex regulatory reporting, challenging business needs around analytics, demand for management information, and customer demand for more varied products and services had led to a disparate technology and data estate.

Nationwide’s transformation was spearheaded by achieving tighter control of its data governance efforts, ensuring Data Governance activity focused on what matters most to the Building Society and its customers. The aim was to bring data governance onto a single, enterprise-wide platform with three key building blocks: what data Nationwide has, who owns it, and whether the quality is fit for purpose.

BCBS 239 compliance has been the foundational data governance activity at Nationwide and was the primary use case for the initial Collibra deployment - a deployment that has proven a clear success. Introduced by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision following the 2008 financial crisis, BCBS 239 sets out 14 principles to ensure accurate, timely and comprehensive risk data reporting. Before Collibra, that compliance was demonstrated annually through manual auditing; the goal now is to make those processes active, so that compliance can be monitored automatically and in real time.

Strategy

Finding the best fit for the business

Nationwide was facing challenges scaling its existing data governance tools across the organisation, while also needing to strengthen its BCBS 239 audit capabilities. Collibra emerged as a strong fit for the next phase of Nationwide's data governance journey, not only because of its robust Edge integrations and compatibility with core enterprise technologies such as Databricks, but also because it aligned with Nationwide’s federated approach to data governance. By providing intuitive, easy-to-adopt tooling, Collibra enabled business users to take greater ownership of data governance activities, embedding accountability closer to the data while maintaining enterprise-wide standards. The arrival of a new team with extensive Collibra experience further reinforced confidence that Collibra was the right platform for the business.

Nationwide has implemented the Collibra Platform to provide trusted, AI-ready data across a variety of sources. It sits alongside Collibra Data Catalog, Collibra Data Lineage and Collibra Data Quality & Observability, and is natively integrated with Databricks. By simplifying its underlying data warehouse and technology estate — and pairing that simplification with the right automation on Databricks — Nationwide has been able to shift away from manual, point-in-time controls toward automated, active controls embedded in the platform itself. Together, the two solutions have consolidated data governance and control onto a single, unified foundation: Databricks, which houses data for dashboarding, analytics and AI, and Collibra, which enables data governance, quality and lineage. Adoption has been significant — with over 1000 Nationwide colleagues accessing Collibra in 2026 so far.

Solution

Federated approach to data governance

Nationwide had already begun developing its data governance strategy and adopted a federated approach, with a strong centre of excellence supporting several data domains across the organisation. The initial activity focused on understanding the Nationwide’s critical data — identifying the data elements essential to running the business, the authoritative sources where those elements live and the owners accountable for their quality. “Collibra helps us move away from needing an army of people to determine critical data, and shift to more smart and intelligent data consumption across dashboards and reports,” stated Jack Pettiford, Head of Metadata, Data Quality & Data Governance Technology at Nationwide.

That foundational work on critical data has been combined with a modern approach on the Lakehouse to create something more powerful than either piece alone. Through the integration of Collibra and Databricks, the Nationwide can now see how its most critical data is being consumed across reports and analytics, while automated lineage in Collibra has dramatically simplified what used to be a manual control burden. Anomaly detection in Collibra Data Quality & Observability scans Databricks data sets in flight and surfaces issues against business rules without anyone having to go looking for them — turning data quality from a periodic check into a continuous, automated control.

Collibra becomes central to Nationwide data governance

“Collibra is central to how we operate data governance at Nationwide, and with it, we have established an effective data governance foundation,” stated Sian McHenry, Data Governance Director at Nationwide. “Now we are in a much better position to start using well-governed, well-understood and well-managed data across the business. It allows us to move faster on our AI journey and build AI products that have the right guardrails of trust and quality built around our data.”

Collibra and Databricks have delivered significant time savings by automating manual processes — enabling users to know what data is available 90% faster and shifting data lineage from a manual effort to an automated, instant process. By automating the visualization, measurement and validation of data quality, Nationwide has achieved roughly 75%-time savings across these activities. Previously, these were manual processes that were usually out of date as soon as they were completed, because the underlying data is constantly changing.

Building on its proven track record with BCBS 239 compliance, Nationwide is transforming how it meets these rigorous standards. By leveraging its data governance foundation, the Building Society is now driving in-scope BCBS 239 metrics through Collibra and Databricks — automating compliance tracking rather than relying on periodic manual audits. “We recently presented to an external consultancy about how we are starting to manage BCBS 239 compliance using the integration between Collibra and Databricks,” commented Pettiford. “The consultancy told us it was the first time they had seen true end-to-end lineage automation deployed at scale in a live production environment, providing a level of traceability and transparency that had previously been difficult to achieve.”

Collibra is central to how we operate data governance at Nationwide and with it, we have established an effective data governance foundation. Now we are in a much better position to start using well-governed, well-understood and well-managed data across the business. It allows us to move faster on our AI journey and build AI products that have the right guardrails of trust and quality built around our data.

Sian McHenry

Sian McHenry

Sian McHenry

Data Governance Director, Nationwide Building Society

Results

Increasing data quality and trust

Pettiford added that, in addition to the time savings already realised in data governance, he expects to see further time and efficiency improvements across the business as trust in better-quality data continues to grow.

One of the key areas of improvement for Nationwide has been increased data trust. With greater trust, the Building Society can make more informed and accurate decisions. “The issue around data trust is having confidence that the data is good enough to use for a report, process or key business decision,” explained Pettiford. “We can source data from Databricks and build reports, and through Collibra we can see exactly where the data is coming from, what it is and who owns it — and that gives you a significant increase in trust. That same lineage tells the story end-to-end, so when the business asks why a number has moved, we can answer in minutes rather than weeks.”

Since deploying Collibra, Nationwide has seen meaningful progression in its data management maturity — assessed against the EDM Council's Data Management Capability Assessment Model (DCAM), the industry-standard framework for evaluating an organization's data management capability — and is on a trajectory to advance further still.

“Collibra has helped Nationwide manage data risk and embed data controls to enable well-governed, well-trusted data, while advancing compliance with regulations like BCBS 239 and IFRS 9,” commented Srinath Srinivasan Kanisapakkam, Nationwide’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer. “Now we are looking to go further and increase trust, identify the best data sources and then improve and simplify how data is used throughout Nationwide. If we can govern that well, which is where we are going with solutions like Collibra and Databricks, then we are in a pretty good space.”

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