After a brief break we're back with a focus on savings – and an overview of what we've done to help us deliver on one of our Strategic Priorities – ‘Savings Rebooted’. 

Savings

When it comes this savings rebooted the Savings Team are really making it happen this year – launching new products to help people build their financial resilience and rewarding our most loyal customers.

It’s been a strong year for savings, not just in terms of our financial performance, but really demonstrating what it means to be a mutual.

Highlights so far:

• Rewarding loyalty

Building on the successful loyalty campaign last year, we’ve made further improvements by allowing web-enabled customers to apply for loyalty products online. A huge step forward in our priority to give unbelievably easy and efficient access to our savings products.

So far we’ve successfully launched an impressive five loyalty products (setting us apart from most of our competitors) and given over £37m in passback through our loyalty initiatives.

• Flexible tiering

In June, we launched the Family Saver account, the first ever product to use our new ‘flexible tiering’ functionality.

This was a huge achievement and this new way of paying interest means we can now pay different rates proportionally. Which enables us to pay higher rates of interest on lower balances, and the ability to provide reverse tiered products to our customers really shows how we care about people. Not only does it allow us to develop purposeful solutions to aid financial resilience, but it also enables us to provide help to those who really need it. 

Last month we started to communicate to over 1m customers about migrating their accounts in November to flexible tiered products, increasing rates in the process. This effective ‘floor raise’ means 84% of customers will receive an additional 0.10% increase on their first tier, further encouraging financial resilience for those with lower balances.

• Financial resilience

We kickstarted the year with our Make Me A Saver (MMAS) account – which really embodied our purpose of real help with real life.

This is the first prize draw account we’ve offered, and the aim is to help encourage better habits through regular savings in order to build financial resilience, whilst also giving customers the chance to win one of 10 monthly prizes of £1,500 (the average monthly cost for family household bills).

One of our MMAS winners, Phillip Chan, said:

"It will really help me with my bills over the coming months. Everything is going up and it is a worry, now this gives me a bit more of a cushion not to have to worry.”

We’ve also continued the great work on our ‘Money MOT’ webpages, adding some new supporting information to help educate our customers on all things savings. This included adding an ‘ISAs explained’ section in April, to really help our customers increase their knowledge and awareness around the ways they can start to save ahead of this year’s ISA season.

• Transformation

The ever-changing competitive environment means that we need to adapt and respond. A key milestone this year in Commercial Savings has been supporting the Payment Simplification project, in the removal of payment functionality from our savings products.

Simplifying our internal infrastructure means we’re able to provide a better product portfolio which best suits our customer base and their needs and helps us give our members the best value we possibly can.

Another huge step where we've helped make it happen is our support within the digital space. We’ve been involved in the key initiative of improving our digital on-boarding service in partnership with HooYu, which launched in March. We’ve since worked with other teams in the business to extend the new service to four different products, with plans to roll this out even further this year whilst we continuously look to make improvements where we can for our customers.

• Base Rate

The Bank of England started to increase the base rate in December 2021 and has done so another five times since. You’d have to go back over 30 years to find a time where the base rate has increased as frequently!

So far this year, we’ve provided better value for our members by increasing both our on-sale and off-sale rates by 1.00% or greater. The annualised impact of the increases landed will equate to approximately an additional £250m in interest for our members.

Continuing to offer competitive rates across our product range throughout the year alongside our loyalty programme has really enabled us to give back to our customers – nothing demonstrates this more than the fact we’re now paying 0.44% more in interest than the market average!

On 5 October we increased our rates by 0.30% across the majority of our off-sale (back-book) variable savings accounts, whilst also increasing rates on our current on-sale range accounts (with the exception of the latest Loyalty Regular Savers). This means 97% of our savings accounts will see an increase in rate of at least 0.30%.

The minimum rate on our variable back-book savings products will now be 1.80% for unrestricted access and 1.85% for restricted access products.

The minimum rate now offered on our on-sale range will be 1.70%.

So what’s coming happening now?

• We’ve recently launched our Rainy Day Account
• The first ever UK Savings Week (which we’ve championed)
• Our final Loyalty product the Loyalty Six Access Saver (non-ISA) and as we’ll also be launching a bond which will be designed to help highlight and educate people on the importance of green initiatives.
• We’ll be starting the New Year off with a bang with our Christmas Regular Saver 2023, which via regular savings aims to help make Christmastime that little bit more manageable for our members.

Chris Irwin, Director of Savings, said:

“Savings Rebooted has come such a long way since we launched our Strategic Blueprint two years ago. We’ve worked hard to develop new purposeful products to support customers’ financial wellbeing, to improve the online experience so that customers can open accounts quickly and easily, and at the same time, we’ve passed even more value back to our members.

“As well as benefitting our customers, the improvements we’ve made to our savings offering have helped us commercially – we’re outperforming our original inflow targets and our savings book has never been bigger, which allows us to support the mortgage side of the business to lend more ambitiously and help more people have a place to call home.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to also say a big thank you to everyone who has supported all of these amazing initiatives. We’ve now got an opportunity to build on this momentum and reach for even better – so watch this space to see what we do next in Savings!” 

Continuing to drive change, whether that be through propositions, rate increases or transformation, really helps us to deliver real help with real life, and it goes without saying we couldn’t do any of these great things without every single one of you. So, we’d like to take the opportunity to say a huge thank you from everyone in Savings, and we look forward to seeing what we can deliver together going into next year.

Smarter Savings Conversations

Training for your teams to help them deliver brilliant savings meetings is now live and your team can self-enrol to take advantage of this – please see attached.

Community

Sunday 25 September 2022 saw the first ever YBS Fest!

A day for Colleagues, Friends and Family to come along, have some fun in the sun. Click the link here or take a look at the intranet for details on how it went. 

Small Change, Big Difference:

The current opt-in rate for SCBD is 49%, which is just lower than the ambition of 51%. We know that the introduction of loyalty products can have an impact. Please continue to encourage your colleagues to keep having the great conversations to support our YBS Charitable Foundation and in turn to support your local communities.

Network Update

Digital Skills

Reminder – we’ve now launched our brand-new Digital Skills Programme to help everyone at YBS build the skills and confidence needed to thrive in an increasingly digital world, both at work and in everyday lives.

Your teams with YBS access will be able to follow this link Intranet - Our Digital Skills Programme is here! and undertake a digital skills self-assessment. This will teach them more about their existing skills and where there might be any gaps. They can then take control of their learning at their own pace to increase confidence and allow them to improve the digital conversations they have with our customers.

Support with T&C activity

Agencies will be getting a new system called Worksmart for tracking and recording T&C activity from the 1 November. 

You'll be able to record that 121s and observations have taken place and the results of those observations within the Worksmart system. This replaces the need for paper files and to report in manually to your RAM. In addition, we'll be able to circulate training events and the system will record completion, again removing the need for manual reporting. 

There'll be a separate message on this very soon, with a user guide and offer of support, to help everyone get used to this new system.

Our new Linkedin Networking Page 

The Linked in page is a great opportunity to enhance our relationship together and build on the existing channels we already use. As a reminder ……it’s a private group open to invited members only. A space to share best practice and take a steer from you on what you want or need from us. You’ll find introductions to some of the RAM team, and we’ll use it for timely updates outside of this monthly digest. Any feedback on what you would like to see featured just let us know.

Please join the page via your LinkedIn Profile - to keep up to date and to help support our own mutual commercial growth aspirations. As always anything specifically relating to your location, please always reach out to your RAM.

New Agency

Woolton Village branch was the latest to be converted into an agency on 23 September - Debby Johnson of Dee Mortgages is now operating 4 agencies in the North West of England & North Wales.