Nationwide Building Society Improves Member Experiences with Pega Smart Dispute

READING, UK. – April 20, 2022 – Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company that crushes business complexity, today announced Nationwide Building Society deployed Pega Smart Dispute for Issuers to transform its Visa card disputes process. This enabled Nationwide to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction by streamlining the systems required to handle a dispute from 15 down to two and reducing dispute processing time by approximately 15%. 

Nationwide Building Society is a mutual financial institution, the seventh largest cooperative financial institution and the largest building society in the world, that is run for the benefit of its 16 million+ members. The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented 251% surge in Visa card disputes, putting extreme pressure on branch staff and contact centers, resulting in challenges managing servicing queues. In response, Nationwide selected Pega Smart Dispute to modernise and consolidate its systems to improve the member experience and reduce operating costs. The new deployment also allows members to now initiate and track disputes online, making them more efficient and accessible.  

Nationwide has realised several other improvements to the member and employee experience with Pega, including:

• Faster servicing times: Reduction of wait times for members with the introduction of a self-service function. 
• Streamlined systems: By condensing the number of systems, one call handler can now deal with the member facing dispute process without handing off. 
• Faster dispute processing: The straight-through processing capabilities of Pega allowed Nationwide to combat surges in demand, resulting in faster resolution of claims for members. 
• Optimised interactions: With Pega’s guided recommendations, the message from all call handlers is consistent, dramatically improving the member experience. 
• Faster roll-out of compliance releases: With Pega’s regular Visa compliance releases, the development team can quickly implement necessary changes, with all analysis conducted by Pega. This creates a repeatable cycle that reduces business risk. 

For the implementation, Nationwide turned to its long-standing strategic partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Leveraging its deep contextual knowledge of Nationwide’s payments business, and its technology expertise, TCS, a Global Elite Pega Partner, helped customise and deploy the Smart Dispute solution. 

Nationwide plans to continue using Pega, and collaborating with TCS to improve member experience and roll out the payment disputes capability to other business units in the coming months.

Quotes & Commentary:

‘We have now successfully completed thousands of consumer Visa dispute claims and have finally been able to retire our legacy forms system,” said Martin Watkin, product owner, payment CIO, Nationwide Building Society. “With this digital transformation, our member facing colleagues are able to consistently deliver an excellent experience in a simple and straight forward manner that is also hassle free for colleagues in operational areas.” 
 
“In today's environment, it is crucial to streamline resolution of critical customer issues such as payment disputes and reduce the effort of servicing and operations staff,” said Steve Morgan, banking industry market lead, Pegasystems. “Nationwide Building Society has demonstrated success with Pega by intelligently automating processes, retiring legacy systems, and saving both members and staff time. Nationwide will reap the rewards of their technology modernisation efforts, with the ability to more rapidly respond to future regulatory changes and evolving payment trends."

Supporting Resources:

• Product background: Pega Smart Dispute™