Newcastle Building Society

Newcastle Building Society is one of the UK’s top 10 building societies, dedicated to supporting its members’ financial well-being and future goals. With 32 high street branches, the society helps customers secure homes, save for the future, and access trusted financial advice. As a customer-owned organization, Newcastle Building Society prioritizes sustainable growth that benefits both its members and the local community.

To deliver the same reliable experience online as in-branch, Newcastle Building Society uses Kontent.ai as its content management system. Their success with Kontent.ai lies in three key areas: simplified maintenance of complex content, the intuitive authoring experience, and solution scalability.

Let’s look at these aspects in more detail with insights from Owen McCabe, Junior Product Owner, Newcastle Strategic Solutions, and Tom Lainchbury, Digital Optimisation Specialist, Newcastle Building Society.

Compliance meets consistency when IT and business teams collaborate

For Newcastle Building Society, ensuring that content is compliant, clear, and easy to understand is essential to meeting both financial regulations and members’ expectations. Recently, the society transitioned from an agency-based development model to their own in-house development; for them, close collaboration between IT and content teams has helped focus development on the right business needs, drastically reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Owen shares what this collaboration looks like: “Tom and I talk regularly, working together on all requirements. My team’s responsible for creating the content model and elements that allow the team to not only tell the stories they’re trying to tell, but also achieve compliance. Sometimes the main question to answer is, how do we do something the way the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) wants it to be done? Other times, it’s about giving Tom’s team the ability to better engage with customers, while aligning with brand guidelines. Everything we do is in service of continuous improvement.”

Backed by a strong content model that makes content reuse easy and efficient, the team has reduced content duplication, improved content consistency, and sped up publishing. The Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) approach with Kontent.ai has been a huge benefit, especially in the maintenance of mortgage product information for their member site, newcastle.co.uk, and their B2B website, newcastleforintermediaries.co.uk.

“These sites share about eighty percent of the same mortgage products,” said Owen. “Using Kontent.ai, content editors only have to build out the mortgages once in the platform. From there, they simply add them to each different relation tree. It takes roughly one to two hours to build each mortgage product. For a big launch, editors may need to change five to ten mortgage listings, but sometimes it’s all one hundred. With Kontent.ai, they only have to do the change once, not one hundred times.”

On their B2B website, Owen also recognized a significant reduction in time spent on regular updates to their service standards: from two days to just five minutes a week. “Little things like that have a big and immediate impact on our business,” shared Owen.

Simplifying content in a workspace designed for content creators

Streamlined content management

A particular focus for the content team is to align their content strategy with the UK’s Consumer Duty requirements, which require financial content to be accessible, free from jargon, and easy for members to understand. With Kontent.ai, the society has been able to streamline content management across multiple content owners, which has helped ensure that information remains clear and concise across its web properties.

Tom shared his view of the process: “Financial services is a very complex sector to maintain content for, and there are a lot of different business areas that contribute to the website. Because Kontent.ai is easy to use, we trust that all contributors can maintain their pages as they need to in order to meet our Consumer Duty obligation. Having a CMS like Kontent.ai makes that much easier.”

Top Kontent.ai features

One particular feature received a call out from both Tom and Owen: previews. “It’s a benefit for our stakeholders to see the content in-page, rather than just signing off on a Word document and then having us add it into the CMS,” said Tom.

Owen agreed: “Previews allow us to send mock-ups of pages to various business owners, so that they can provide input and get it through our approval process. It makes sense for us to do as much as we can in the CMS and get content looking how it’s likely going to look when it goes live.”

Kontent.ai’s intuitive platform enables all team members across departments to adopt it. For work experience placements and new hires alike, the ramp-up time to use the system is quick and productive. Plus, Newcastle Building Society has also embraced the in-platform AI capabilities, which allows the content team to easily spin up first drafts of new content.

Tom shared the benefit of AI assistance, available right in the rich text editor: “We do almost all our content creation in the CMS, and the AI assistant can be really helpful in giving us a head start. Whether we’re trying to improve the copy on existing pages, or our digital agency have provided a top-level brief on an SEO content opportunity, we can prompt Kontent.ai to draft us an outline, or even some copy with a specific number of paragraphs or word count. From there, we can simply amend as required, tailoring the content to our business and building upon a strong foundation. It’s a great starting point for us.”

Future growth is welcomed with a modern, scalable CMS

The team is always exploring how to evangelize the benefits of Kontent.ai across the business, even for their branch locations. Areas of their mobile application already benefit from content reuse and automatic updates, but there’s a lot more opportunity to grow, while reducing development overhead. 

Both Owen and Tom see significant potential to leverage Kontent.ai to expand the society’s digital capabilities and connect more closely with members through digital touchpoints.

The teams at Newcastle Building Society value Kontent.ai as a crucial partner on their journey. As Tom summed up, “We’ve been ambitious in terms of our development over the last couple of years and we’re still growing. It’s reassuring to know we won’t be stuck with a CMS that we’ll outgrow. There’s so much potential with Kontent.ai that we can take advantage of.”

To learn more about how Kontent.ai helps customers in the financial services sector succeed, reach out to one of our experts.