Good afternoon and welcome to November’s digest. I hope all is well. This month’s edition covers the usual topics of savings, mortgages, network updates and community.  And as November hosts International Fraud Awareness Week it seems appropriate that this month’s blog covers fraud with handy tips to help keep you and your customers safe.

I’ve written directly to you a number of times this month about the recently announced changes to our Retail Leadership team, including last week when I confirmed the new area structure which we're planning to go live in Q1 2022. I’ll continue to share more information, but until the changes are implemented it's business as usual. If you and your teams can please continue to use your existing communication channels with Business Support and your Development Manager.

Savings

In a similar story to last month’s update, savings performance remains steady in a continuing competitive environment. Our products remain positioned where we want them at present, and we’re happy with our growth and current inflows. Pleasingly, we continue to see a net growth in agency balances.

As explained in detail last month retention activity is key to this net growth with November and December seeing the two biggest maturities of the year. As I wrote with a week to go, agencies have retained 85% of November's maturing fixed balances which is another great performance, so well done to you and your teams. We’ve seen quite a shift into our acquisition range during the month as members moved their funds to our competitively placed on sale products – this also indicates a degree of proactivity and retention conversations taking place. This is where the outbound calls can really add value.

The default rates have increased for December’s maturities – this is due to a combination of the size (and therefore importance) of this maturity, and also competitor pricing, and so should support at least a repeat retention performance. 

The Christmas Regular Saver has started strongly with circa 2,000 accounts opened in the network since its launch on 21 October 2021, average of 80 accounts opened per day. Agencies have accounted for 550 of these. 86% of balances is made up of new money, and 25% have been opened by new customers. We’ll continue to monitor the cross sales performance in the coming weeks.

I asked Richard Patterson, Product Development Manager in our Savings Propositions team about our plans for 2022, “The priorities of the team now and throughout 2022 are centred around the Savings Rebooted action areas which are rewarding existing customers through loyalty products/propositions and developing propositions that help build savings habits which develop greater financial resilience. In addition to this there’s a lot of focus around building our digital capabilities to help support our propositions across all channels. Propositions in the pipeline for early 2022 include the Prize Draw which is very much focussed at the mid-life customer segment aiming to attract new customers. This product is a Regular Saver looking to build better savings habits with a monthly prize draw element which pays a sum to broadly cover the winner’s monthly bills. There’s currently a review of what the loyalty proposition will look like going into 2022, along with building our capability to offer smarter/reverse tiering interest products which will give us more flexibility with how we can appeal to our target markets. Lots to look forward to with the focus still very much on offering ‘more than interest’ products/propositions so watch this space”.

 Mortgages

Firstly a short Market update.  While home mover demand has levelled-out in recent months, the average value of those applications has surged, breaking through £260K for the first time. The average mortgage value overall continues to increase, and now stands at £228k – higher than at any point in the last year. Re-mortgaging demand increased by 14% over the course of a fortnight in October, a rate without precedent in the last three years.

Secondly to help capitalise on this market, I asked Sarah Graham (Retail Area Manager), and Adeel Qureshi (Direct Mortgage Team Manager) speak to the proprietor council last week and share an update on the work they’ve been doing since we set up the Retail/Direct Mortgage Team (DMT) partnership. They took away some useful feedback, and so I wanted to extend that request for feedback to you all – over to Sarah…

 “In 2021 the process for mortgage referrals changed for both branch and agency colleagues due to the removal of face-to-face advice. On the back of these changes a team of colleagues from branches, agencies and DMT worked together to plan how we could improve customer and colleague experience when it came to mortgages. We reached out for feedback and the messages we were hearing were that the process of booking a mortgage appointment was too difficult, customers were waiting too long and colleagues lacked knowledge around mortgages.

On the back of the feedback we were able to produce a whole suite of mortgage training material (which is available on sales policy website), videos to introduce the Direct Mortgage Team , new MI that can track enquiries and outcomes, plus a new process for agencies which involves a short email to DMT who will contact customers back within 48 hours. Feedback on the main has been really positive, colleagues have found the training material really useful and the customers have been happy with the experience they are getting from our DMT colleagues.

As part of mortgage journey, we can offer a conversation with a Qualifier in DMT who can discuss affordability, costing and produce an AIP. If the customer would like to apply we can then offer personalised, expert mortgage advice from our Mortgage Adviser teams, they also have a dedicated line to our underwriting team which means we are able to take a common sense and individual approach to underwriting. YBS have a paperless mortgage application process which makes the whole experience quicker and more efficient, leading to a great customer experience. Any new business leads which make it to application will generate £250 for the agency who generated the lead.

We have plans to continue to improve the mortgage referral process into next year, we are looking at new training material and ways DMT can support the network further to give colleague improved knowledge, confidence and skill to increase the conversations they are having around mortgages. To do this we need your support, we would love to hear your ideas on what would work well in your location, what support you need and any feedback from the leads you're passing over”.

If you are a mortgage referral agency, please send your ideas and feedback to me or your DM and we can pass on to Sarah and Adeel.  

Network Updates

The Agency Proprietor Council held its quarterly meeting this month, and as well as the mortgage session, we had guests from the business talk to us about Business Outreach, and some ‘Properly Personal Experience’ ventures, all of which we are planning to roll out further in 2022. A summary of our discussions is below:

Business Outreach

As a building society we are acutely aware of the challenges that face our communities today. Our Purpose, of providing Real Help with Real Life encompasses three core areas:

1. Giving members the best value we can
2. Helping people have a place to call home
3. Helping people build greater financial resilience.

The Business Outreach programme is aligned with our Strategic Blueprint and business ambitions for 2024. Our involvement will contribute to ‘helping 500,000 people within our communities build their financial wellbeing’ before 2024. It aims to enable colleagues to engage with local employers, community groups and business organisations giving them the tools and information they need to cope financially when faced with the unexpected. It enhances YBS's role on the high street; building brand awareness, trust and growing our branch presence all whilst retaining and growing the Society's retail funding balances.

Our branches are undertaking some training and initial activity in Q4, with a view to us extending this to agencies in 2022 – so watch this space.

You’ll know that ‘Properly Personal Experience’ is one of our Strategic Blueprint priorities, and we discussed a couple of the ventures designed to help deliver this:

Warm Welcome

Our Warm Welcome pilot aims to provide more human interaction for our customers – in a market that, for many, feels increasingly transactional and commoditised.

• The pilot has been designed to help us understand once and for all, whether providing a personalised service call for new-to-group savings customers can have a positive impact on their experience with YBS. This is whether they have joined us in a branch, agency or online – and is really bringing to life the ’Properly Personal Experience’ pillar of our strategic blueprint this year
• The pilot went live in a 20 branches on 4 October, and early feedback from colleagues making the calls has shown that customers are receiving them really positively so far. This is especially true of those who have joined us online, and therefore may not even know they have a local face-to-face service that they can access.
• We’re testing these calls in an additional 20 branches and in 6 agencies from 22 November , to increase the overall sample size – and to help us to assess whether to make these more of a BAU feature next year across the network.

Do you want to get involved? If so, please let your DM know. Full training will be provided.

 Savings Pitstop

• Our Savings Pitstop project aims to find new ways to highlight that we offer a face-to-face savings review service on the high street, and to establish a truly ’Properly Personal’ service during every savings conversation. From research we know that 70% of existing members would consider using a savings review / meeting when prompted, but in addition to poor MI on outcomes, this has also identified some barriers to leveraging them fully.
• These include: Lack of a compelling reason for customers to actively ‘come in’ for a meeting (exacerbated by changes of habit during COVID); In-branch marketing materials to aid colleagues in having a spontaneous conversation about meetings and colleague preparedness for an engaging, and personal meetings. We’ve therefore created three concepts designed to help overcome these barriers – and will be testing them in a small number of branches over the next few weeks as Phase 1 of the project.
• For Phase 2, we’ll develop further iterative improvements on the concepts based on customer and colleague feedback, before a wider roll-out and/or incorporating it into wider Money MOT initiatives. We will also work with Sales Policy to feed in our learnings – to help to prompt a wider review of the role and process for savings meetings overall

More information and opportunities to get involved in 2022, once again, please watch this space.

If you have any feedback on any of the above, please let me know. Or, if you want to suggest a future topic to be discussed at the council meeting in Q1, please let your proprietor contact know.

At a Society level, then I’m delighted to share that we’ve attained the Fairer Finance award and I want to thank all of you and your teams who have contributed to not one but two gold ribbons for our customer service and experience. These gold ribbons demonstrate to our customers that we’ve provided better customer service and experience than most of our financial counterparts. It’s also a really good indication that our customers trust us and are happy to recommend us. The next thing we’ll be looking to is the annual UK Customer Experience Excellence Survey, which is independently run by KPMG Nunwood - the results are due to be shared later this month - really looking forward to seeing how we perform on that one.

We have also been focused on building a Greener Society...it's been impossible to miss the coverage from COP26 and it’s reignited the debate about climate change. Since 2012 YBS has reduced operational emissions by 77%. We now use 100% renewable energy to power our operations. To bring that in terms we can all understand, for every £1m of income we only produce 2.5 Range Rovers worth of carbon dioxide. Our next focus will be aligning with government guidelines on the 2050 net zero target.

Finally, over the last weekend we converted two more branches into agencies, both with existing agency partners. KBA Financial now run an agency in Bury, and Giles Smith Financial Services have taken over in Brighton. This concludes this year’s activity, but more to follow in 2022, please let me know if you’d like to discuss opportunities.

Community

Naomi’s usual community update below, including details of our charity partnership with Age UK, and the launch of a new initiative, please read on.

Small Change Big Difference:

• Our overall YTD sits at 41% with our branches sitting at 41% currently and agencies at 38%. You’re doing a fantastic job at maintaining uptake levels with recent focus which gives us a great platform to work from as we begin to head into the new year.

 Charitable Foundation

• Q3 donations have been released! 63 charities were supported this quarter with 5 successful nominations coming from our branch network. Over £84,000 was donated amongst these charities helping them reach out into our local communities.

 Age UK:

• October has been filled with spooky fundraisers for Age UK and some brilliant sporting challenges. At Welshpool agency each colleague individually ran/walked 100 miles in October, a very impressive achievement and very large collective effort.
• With the funds paid in to end of October our retail contribution for the partnership is a fantastic £73,283 with over £56,500 raised this year, of which £7,600 is from our agency network.
• Since June, participation levels in fundraising for agencies has grown by 34% up to a fantastic 78%. Let’s see if we can reach 100% by Christmas!
• Collectively our partnership total sits at over £422,900. Since the partnership began, Age UK have supported over 1,012 older people to gain great financial wellbeing through the Building Better Lives Programme.
• Now we’re in the final fundraising push before the end of the year, we’d love your support to make a huge impact this festive season! It’s time to get those hamper raffles up and running as well as selling your Christmas decorations and seasonal pin badges. Why not take time as a team to see what you’d like to achieve through our winter fundraisers and see if you can smash through that goal.
• In our retail network we’re also supporting Age UK through our ‘Helping a Brighter Christmas Happen’ campaign. Make sure you familiarise yourself with the 4 simple steps we can encourage each other and our customers to take to support older people during this time.

Future Minds:

• We’re (soft) launching a new digital platform to support 11-19+ with free employability (Career Minds) and financial education (Money Minds) interactive content. Future Minds is a direct response to the need for relevant materials for older children through the channels that best suit their learning needs. It is digital-first and flexible to allow for face-to-face delivery, individual study or conversations at home. To help test the new platform, we will be launching the new site with you, our colleagues, and Bradford partner schools. We’d like you to view the site and use the materials with your children. Testing in this way will ensure we receive a breadth of feedback. This launched in November through the intranet and email communications.

I hope you enjoyed this month’s update, there are lots of requests for feedback included this month, and I would really like to hear from you on any of these topics.