Jem Walters became chief technology officer (CTO) at banking group Vanquis in September 2023 after scratching an itch. Having spent 23 years with Virgin Money, latterly as CIO, he wanted to try his hand at entrepreneurship. He co-founded the successful money-saving app Snoop, which Vanquis bought in July 2023.
While Walters had scratched his itch and learnt much in the process, the acquisition created an opportunity to return to the corporate side as CTO at Vanquis. The banking group, formed in 1880 and known as Provident Financial until 2023, had a legacy IT challenge. Senior executives believed Walters could help the business overcome these concerns.
“I’d already been through that process once in my career when Virgin Money bought Northern Rock in 2012,” says Walters, reflecting on the opportunity. “I wasn’t 100% sure it’s what I wanted to do next in my career.”
After a conversation with the senior team, he quickly changed his mind. Now, two-and-a-half years later, he’s glad he did.
“What we’re embarking on and what we’ve delivered over the last couple of years has been remarkable in terms of technology transformation,” he says. “I have such a good team here – so committed and skilful. They’re a joy to work with. It’s just good to be here, and I’m really enjoying the challenge.”
Grabbing the opportunity
The challenge Walters faces is straightforward on paper – combining his experiences of dealing with legacy IT with his awareness of enterprise-grade agile development at Snoop. Of course, dealing with a challenge in real life is much harder than describing the process on paper. As he began working on the task at hand at Vanquis, several key questions became apparent.
“Can we move to a digital operating model?” he says. “And culturally, certainly from a technology and change point of view, can we start to think, behave and work more like a big fintech than a small bank? And so that’s a big part of the culture that I’m trying to drive here. Can we get more entrepreneurial? Can we be more fleet of foot? Can we improve our speed to market? Ultimately, that’s what we need to do to compete in this market.”
FTSE-listed Vanquis is a specialist bank that provides credit cards and loans to more than 1.7 million UK borrowers and savers whose personal financial circumstances can mean they are often excluded from mainstream banks. The organisation offers a range of credit cards and savings products, as well as the money management app Snoop and specialist vehicle finance through Moneybarn. Walters recognises the business is a complex blend.
“In banks that have been around for decades, technology is largely organised in product silos. That’s true in many businesses I’ve seen over the years, and that was certainly true at Vanquis. From an in-house manufacturing perspective, we had three disparate legacy technology stacks – one for credit cards, one for vehicle finance and one for personal loans,” he says.
“Over the years, you might make one good decision at a time, but the technology gets quite complicated, and it’s difficult to maintain and change, and upgrades get deprioritised for new business launches or whatever. Our vision was, ‘Okay, let’s pivot to a customer-centric data model. Let’s digitise the business in terms of how we service customers’.”
Digitising the business
Walters says his ambitious transformation programme has four key pillars. First, Gateway, which he describes as the core business platform that covers everything for servicing the bank’s customers and providing them with products.
“We’re consolidating everything into a Salesforce stack,” he says, suggesting the company uses a range of the technology giant’s products and services. “We’ve said, ‘Let’s make sure that if we can do something in Salesforce, we’ll do it’, and we’ve developed a strong strategic partnership there.”
As a second pillar, Vanquis is transforming its data environment. “We’re building a single source of the truth, which is well-governed and has all the proper data governance in place, in the sense of data dictionaries, lineage, single business owners and the definitions of metrics,” says Walters. The data platform is built on Snowflake technology.
“We’re building a single source of the truth, which is well-governed and has all the proper data governance in place”
Jem Walters, Vanquis
The third pillar covers the modern workplace environment. Vanquis used disparate technology stacks, with employees having different email address formats across multiple Microsoft tenants.
“Collaboration didn’t quite work; document sharing didn’t work,” he says. “So, we’ve got everyone on a single tenant and upgraded the laptops and operating systems.”
The final pillar is shared services. As an example, Walters says Vanquis used three separate human resources systems.
“So, let’s bring that into one platform,” he says, adding that Vanquis now uses Dayforce HR technology. The company is also consolidating monitoring and logging via Sumo Logic, managing security operations via Rapid7, and aims to refresh its IT service management approach this year.
“Those are the four pillars,” says Walters. “There aren’t many stones that are not being left unturned. And we’re making really good progress across all of them.”
Pursuing digital transformation
Delivering digital transformation has involved a methodical process. While good progress was being made before Walters joined, he’s focused on developing an implementation strategy.
“It’s about working backwards from right to left,” he says. “A big-bang approach is just not feasible. You can’t move two million customers over in an hour. It’s too much risk, so we had to figure out a mechanism to implement technology incrementally and then migrate customer data where needed.”
One crucial part of this shift has been data consolidation. Walters’ team developed a concept called the customer kernel record, creating a single operational view of customers using the Salesforce platform, with 2.4 million records from 15 different data sources. Walters recognises that creating a single customer view is not a one-time hit. New clients must be onboarded, and changes to the Salesforce record must synchronise with the remaining legacy systems.
However, once the new Gateway system went live last February, his team found it much easier to bring systems and processes into the technology stack.
“As a proof point, a month later, we moved all our complaints processing onto the Salesforce stack, and we got 1,500 operation centre agents moved across, and that all went really well,” he says.
“The shift to Gateway was the key to unlocking our implementation strategy, which means we can now deliver more old blocks of processes at a time, and then just train people up to do that particular part of the business. That’s now a rolling programme of work.”
Boosting mobile experiences
Walters says digital transformation continues apace. Vanquis recently launched its new app, a process that includes migrating a million customers and loading more than 30 billion rows of customer, product and decisioning data onto the platform underpinning the software.
“One of the smart things we did was to get the Snoop team to build the new Vanquis banking app,” he says. “That approach was a bit of a no-brainer for me, because we spent five years at Snoop building apps, and we became good at understanding what you need to do to build a digital business.”
That learning process was important because Walters suggests building banking apps is far from easy. Drawing on the skills of the internal Snoop team helped keep costs in check. The process, which includes measuring and monitoring performance, also provided a case study on agile development methods for the rest of the business.
“That approach has been really beneficial, and it paves the way for something that we’re going to embark on later this year, which is to start to integrate the Snoop-style money management features into the Vanquis banking app experience – and that’s where things start to get really interesting, because I don’t think anyone else in the UK has cracked that nut,” he says.
Other ongoing transformation efforts include credit card onboarding, where Walters’ team has built a new platform. This platform will give the business access to better decisioning systems, improved risk and fraud management capabilities, and additional data sources for affordability assessments. The Gateway transformation involves two more key milestones.
“One is bringing collections and forbearance processes onto the new stack,” he says. “The last piece of the jigsaw is building a new vehicle finance platform, which we’re well underway with. All of those things should be complete this year. There is quite a lot going on.”
Enhancing personalisation
Walters says Vanquis will continue to hone its mobile app during the next two years. The aim is to use the in-house design team to build a great customer experience. He paints a picture of the firm’s future money management app.
“It will be easy to do your banking,” he says. “We will have agentic AI, so – if you can’t self-serve in the app – the chat functionality will allow you to do anything else that you want to do, and you won’t have to speak to a human if you don’t want to, or chat with a human, but that option will always be available.”
The general direction of travel, suggests Walters, is hyper-personalisation. He expects the bank to continue developing new products in key areas, such as improving creditworthiness and providing credit facilities. The aim is to help Vanquis customers see all their products and services in one place and to enable as much self-service as possible.
“Through Snoop and the connectivity with other bank accounts and credit cards, we can provide a hyper-personalised service. We’ve already proven we can do that and help customers save money. And that’s not necessarily through products that we manufacture or sell, but through the price comparison capability that we have in Snoop,” he says.
“So, whether it’s your energy, broadband, mobile phone or insurance, we can help. And that approach starts to sound interesting and unrecognisable from the business I joined two or three years ago.”
