Good Morning,

Welcome to the October digest. As we move towards the end of the year, this month’s blog content focusses on Growth Plans – looking back at things that have worked out in the network in 2021, and helping you formulate your plans for 2022. There is no mortgage commentary this month, but an in-depth savings summary along with the usual community and network updates. I hope you enjoy reading the digest, and that the blog  gives you some useful food for thought.

Savings

As noted, last month savings balance growth has slowed a little compared to earlier in the year, but it is still growing. The overall book remains bang-on our growth aspirations for the year at £35.8Bn with the network holding £26.5Bn. Within this the retail network has seen savings flows of £1.3Bn year-to-date which is £464m ahead of plan. A great year so far.

The total growth of the agency network is over 12% in 2021, and over 60 agencies have seen double digit growth, something I’m sure you all aspire to and will hope to maintain for the rest of the year and then replicate in 2022. As I’m sure you’re sick of me saying, the key to this is both attract & retain.

Strong retention performance in 2021 has been vital to the commercial strength of our and your business. Growing our balances, and our member base, is significantly easier when we’re doing such a good job of keeping our existing customers. Retention performance was at 86% for September. It’s important to remember that the savings market and customer behaviour is returning to some sort of normality and as a result we’re seeing retention levels returning to where they were ‘pre-pandemic’ and, of course, that 86% is a strong performance. However we had been getting used to over 90%. Retention is going to play a big part in achieving our year end plan with November and December the biggest maturities of the year with £821m and £976m, respectively, maturing (agencies account for approx. 20% in each month). There’s also in the region of £8Bn maturing across the rest of market in November so it’s a fantastic opportunity to attract and finish the year strongly. During the process of collating information for the attached blog, the Development Managers provided me with loads of great examples of ‘growth plans in action’, and the type of activities that had helped agencies exceed their goals. Amongst a number of themes, the most common was in relation to outbound calling. Those agencies that have embraced these calls have really reaped the benefits. These calls have played a particularly key role in the retention performance, so I’d suggest it’d be wise for them to feature prominently in your plans.

As you will see below, November, December & January are all high-volume maturities, but December’s also sees a high % of customers who are going through our maturity journey for the very first time. The calls will therefore be crucial and an opportunity to deliver a first-class, ‘Unbelievably Easy & Efficient’ experience for thousands of customers.

In line with our strategic blueprint of making things ‘unbelievably easy and efficient’, I am pleased to announce that we now have a new way to help with the processing of your maturing bonds and ISA’s. No longer will you have to wait until the 1^st working day of the month and sit for a whole day completing product transfer after product transfer. We have created a new screen within Head Office Functionality (HOF), where the maturity instructions can be entered as soon as you receive them from your customer(s), this screen will then automatically product transfer the customers selected product on the day of maturity.

I hope you agree that this will be a massive help and will spread the workload over the month, this new screen will be going live in time for any fixed rate maturities to be processed from mid-November. This can only mean positive things for our customers, as they will be in their chosen product as soon as we reach the 1^st of the month, regardless of whichever day this falls on (weekends/bank holidays). No delays to interest calculations. No more “bond day”.

We have been using this in branches for the past 3-4 months and they have really found it beneficial, the delay rolling out to agencies was whilst I ensured the pre-population of instructions would be classed as an agency transaction for servicing commission purposes.

This month has also seen the launch of our new Christmas Regular Saver both in branch and online. It’s been a while since we have had a regular saver as part of our ‘available to everyone’ product range. It is part of our strategy to offer purposeful products, and this will help to promote Financial Resilience. It will also provide a great opportunity to promote the rest of our competitive savings range, we have assumed that 15% of Regular Saver customers would take out a further savings product during the 12-month term of their account. We are looking to have the product on-sale until Mid-December, and dependent on its success will determine if we look to do something similar each year.

Increased footfall (hopefully of the new variety) will also help us develop our other strategic aims to increase marketing opt-ins and e-enablement.

Network Updates

I hope you saw Mike Regnier’s recent message to you making you aware that for the second year we’ll be recognising the unprecedented disruption that Covid-19 has caused to YBS by closing the business on Christmas Eve to give all YBS colleagues an extended break (the way the calendar falls means a 5 day break). It’s important to note that we’re not planning to make this a regular change – we’ve decided that we wanted to recognise again this year the extraordinary lengths that colleagues have gone to in responding to the effect of the pandemic and this is our way of saying thank you to all our colleagues for their effort, commitment and contribution during what has been another very challenging year.

This effort, commitment & contribution also applies to agency colleagues, so if you wanted to follow suit, then this would be at your discretion as the proprietor. I do hope and encourage that like last year, this is the option you choose. If you decide instead to open, please can you make your Development Manager aware ASAP. Please note there will be no support functions available on the day.

Speaking of support functions, Bobbie Jagger (Business Support Manager) recently sent a message out to all agencies with a guide designed to help support Agency colleagues with any queries they may have. It includes loads of useful information such as who makes up Business Support, meet the team, who to call/what to check, agency discretion, useful links & numbers, quick guides and new starter processes. This is aimed at improving the colleague and customer experience and will be updated as required, so please encourage your teams to use this and provide feedback. 

I talked about the Desktop refresh in September’s Digest, and also mentioned that we were starting some ‘test and learn’ activity in branches and agencies. Cleckheaton and Brighouse have got their new base units with Windows 10 (along with new mice and keyboards) - Cleckheaton have said they feel things are running faster! We have also implemented this pilot in Pudsey agency which transitioned across smoothly and were back transacting for customers quickly. The colleagues instantly noticed the improvements to YBS live, along with other systems and we will continue to get their feedback to share this moving forward.

Following the successful pilot activity, the full rollout will commence in November and run for 3 months. I will provide a schedule once it’s finalised, but to reassure you, the work will take place during your normal opening hours and disruption will be kept to a minimum (offline for approx. 1 hour). There is some preparation required, and some testing during implementation. There was a full retail briefing pack for your teams last week.

Last weekend, Southampton branch converted to become our 113th agency, this is in partnership with St Barts Finance an existing agency partner. There are two more conversions planned in November.

Community

Please see below for the usual infographic and summary from our Community Manager, Naomi Hockney. Could you consider some community activity to boost your profile as part of your growth plans?

Small Change Big Difference:

• Our overall YTD sits at 41% with our branches sitting at 42% currently and agencies at 38%. The first of our Small Change Big Difference upskilling drop-ins happened this week with a fantastic response from branches. Get in touch with Kerry Shaw, Community Engagement Lead for agencies for more details on how you can get involved further.

Charitable Foundation

• Quarter 3 nominations are now closed with outcome expected to land next month. Quarter 4 nominations are now open for submissions and will be open until the end of the year.

Age UK:

• We had a fantastic and COLOURFUL September - with over £11,200 raised through the Colour Run and dress down day! Thanks so much to all colleagues who got involved and helped make the day a success.
• With the funds paid in to end of September our retail contribution for the partnership is a fantastic £66,611 with over £49,000 raised this year of which £6,100 is from our agency network.
• Collectively our partnership total sits at over £403,000! And since the partnership began, Age UK have supported over 812 older people to gain great financial wellbeing through the Building Better Lives Programme. The 1-2-1 bespoke sessions have helped unlock a staggering total £2.7 million of potential benefit entitlement.
• We’ve seen another jump in the number of agencies get on board with Age UK partnership fundraising. Since last month participation has jumped 9% up to 68%. A huge well done to those agencies who have stepped up their involvement since last month.
• Look out for more details of (dare we say…!) Christmas Fundraising in the Community newsletter from your DM and for colleagues on the Community Hub. We’re talking Hampers, colleague raffle and festive jumper days!

Money Minds:

• Last month our Community Engagement Leads held three Money Minds Upskilling sessions with over 80 retail colleagues joining in. Our colleagues have been set the challenge of booking a new Money Minds session with a local school or community organisation over the next month! We’ve had some great feedback already and can’t wait to hear more over the coming weeks. If you’d like to know more about upskilling to deliver Money Minds – let your Development Manager or Community Engagement Lead, Kerry Shaw know.

As ever if you have any feedback in relation to the content of this digest or suggested future content, please let me know. I will write again in November.