Good morning, and welcome to the latest digest. Since the last update in July, I hope you’ve had a good summer and managed to get a break of some kind. It doesn’t seem too long ago since we started the year with a new look digest and plans to introduce some member incentives, and we are now entering the final quarter of the year, time has certainly flown.

This month there is the usual savings, mortgage and community commentary, and lots of network updates, with news on our new brand positioning, desktop refresh and wider digital transformation update. I hope you enjoy the content.

Savings

As expected, a slower month during August and September so far with overall savings flows slightly below plan, although the retail network performed as expected. Fixed retention performance finished just below 88% for August and is on track for similar in September. Given the withdrawal of the loyalty products and holding our pricing position, this is another strong result. Savings flows for the retail network have now reached £1.28bn, which is well ahead of 2021 plan YTD.

As an agency network, the story is similar to that in my last update, with every agency showing a positive growth for 2021, and the total agency network growth is 11.2% so far year to date. The growth rates have slowed a little, but the agency network has still shown a positive weekly growth every week this year, a great effort. We’ll continue to review our product pricing in line with our growth plans to ensure we finish the year where we need to be – and this has seen us recently reprice our fixed rate range to protect our competitive position. This will help with both attraction and retention. We’re also constantly looking at our product range, and are hoping to launch a Christmas Saver (for Christmas 2022), which will be coming soon.

Hopefully your own 2021 growth plans have come to fruition, and you are striving to exceed them by as much as possible in the remaining quarter, and also starting to think about next year’s ambitions and what you need to do to achieve them.

Mortgages

Our savings plans are directly aligned to our mortgage plans and performance, and competition within the mortgage market has intensified further in August and September. We’ve continued to see significant downward pressure on rates, with the Big 6 fighting for the top spots across all LTV tiers (with lots of sub 1% rates).

The number of homes for sale has plunged by more than a quarter in an "acute" shortage which is predicted to continue well into 2022. This has been caused by record demand from buyers clamouring to make the most of the stamp duty holiday depleting stock levels this year, but first-time buyers flooding back to the market are also expected to erode supply into 2022.  So far this year there have been 26% fewer properties on the market, compared to the 2020 average, while buyer demand was a fifth higher, according to Zoopla. It has resulted in the biggest stock shortage ever recorded by the property listings site. Even without the disruption of the pandemic, stock levels are still down by a third compared to 2019 and 2018.

Borrower market share is growing more dynamic. By value, home movers still lead the way, but are down to a 35.6% market share, having been almost eight points higher in mid-April. Re-mortgagers were barely generating one-fifth of residential application values at that time, but are now up to precisely one-third. First time buyer market share is edging nearer to re-mortgagers’ at 30.8%. From your perspective with an eye on your savings growth, the more we can lend, then more we will have an appetite for funds from savers. The referral process enables your customers (whether home movers, first time buyers, or those looking for a better deal) to receive a call back from a member of the Direct Mortgage Team to see how we can help them.

A reminder for those of you who submit direct business of our useful guide. We’ve had a few queries recently which are all covered in this, so it is a good reference point for any new advisers or a refresher for your existing ones.

Community

Small Change Big Difference:

• Our retail YTD sits at 40% and with agencies alone at 38%. In July and August we’ve seen some agencies hit 100% in their month to date figures so a big shout out to Hale, Llanidloes, St John Woods, Barnoldswick, Carlisle and Leyburn for their efforts to raise uptake rates.

Age UK:

• On Friday 17 September we held our first in-person challenge event for our Age UK partnership – a fantastic COLOUR RUN! We had over 85 colleagues join us in sunny Wellholme park raising over £9,000 with more left to come through! Colleagues across the business joined the fun with a Colourful Dress Down Day brightening offices with donations all to Age UK.
• With the funds paid in to end of August our retail contribution for the partnership is a fantastic £59,439 with over £42,000 raised this year of which over £5,200 is from our agency network. Huge well done to Church Stretton Agency for their summer raffle bringing in a fantastic £575!
• We’ve seen a fantastic jump in the number of agencies get on board with Age UK partnership fundraising. Since June participation has jumped 15% up to 59%. A huge well done to those agencies who have stepped up their involvement since last month.
• Collectively our partnership total sits at over £316,000! And since the partnership began, Age UK have supported over 737 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 £1.9m of potential benefit entitlement.
• Elsewhere through our fundraising we’ve enabled the production of four brand new housing guides for Age UK. Supporting older people at risk of homelessness, homeowners, private renters and those in social housing, the guides will provide jargon-free, myth-busting information to those in need. These are available to individuals in England through the Age UK advice line, their website and throughout our retail network in England.
• We’re supporting a new initiative called Digital Buddies with Age UK - bite-size training to practically support older people with getting to grips with digital. If you’re interested in finding out more about this skilled, ongoing volunteering activity speak to your Development Manager or Community Engagement Lead, Kerry Shaw.

Money Minds:

• Our Community Engagement Leads are working hard on providing some great support for our retail colleagues on the delivery of Money Minds sessions. They’re working away on some workshops that will help train colleagues. If you’d like to know more – let your Development Manager or Community Engagement Lead, Kerry Shaw know.

Network Updates

Marketing

We have developed a new brand positioning which breathes life into our purpose of Real Help with Real Life, by showing how we support our members with their key life moments. Those moments they’ve saved for, work towards and which mean a great deal to them. ‘Helping Real Life Happen’ will showcase the very best of YBS to the outside world and it will give us a unique message and personality to connect with existing members and make us more attractive to future members.

‘Helping Real Life Happen’ will wrap around everything we do, creating a unified brand with a unique selling point for YBS, and increase the impact of our marketing and communications. It will establish YBS as a brand which is “famous for” helping real life happen, and embody the best of YBS; what makes us proud to work here, how we make a difference to our customers’ lives and the importance of the work you do every day. And key to all of this is that we’ll be using real customer stories to bring this to life. Our purpose – Real Help with Real Life – hasn’t changed, it sits behind our brand positioning, providing authenticity to all we do and helps us always check that we’re doing the best for our customers, colleagues and communities.

So, you can expect to see ‘Helping Real Life Happen’ across all our communications going forward; our internal messaging, any external campaigns and communications with a positive message. This includes products, services and purpose, including community activity, our sustainability and social purpose agenda. It will be the focus of our next campaign which will include posters in agencies. You will also see the campaign across our other print and display advertising, our website, our social media channels, media releases and our member communications.

The campaign will tell the stories of our relationships with real members, and it captures the key real-life moments and stories that you have helped to support. Some stories focus on great customer service which goes the extra mile, while others show how our members have benefited from our products. All show the benefits of being a YBS member.

Desktop Refresh

All branches and agencies will soon migrate to Windows 10, receiving new base units, keyboards and mouses.  This is the next stage after the ‘enabling’ work done with the WAN upgrade and server refresh.

We’re starting off by deploying the new Windows 10 machines and devices to a small number of branches and agencies over the coming weeks. These pilots will give us confidence around whether everything is working as expected. If all goes to plan, we aim to complete the migrations by the end of the year.  

We’re taking a ‘test and learn’ approach to this rollout. After all, the desktop project team are remediating years of legacy IT. There will no doubt, be bumps in the road and learnings along the way but, it’s an exciting time for our retail network. This migration is just the next building block of our long-term digital transformation (more of which below).  

While all this testing can seem like it takes longer than it should, the team are balancing working at  pace with ensuring successful delivery of new kit, in a way that’s right first time, for you.  We also need to consider the knock-on effect of the Covid-19 pandemic (I couldn’t get through a whole digest without mentioning this in some context!) which is impacting hardware lead times. Although we are working with our suppliers to reduce any potential impact, it is a challenging environment and therefore, the rollout timeline could change.  You will be notified when your agency’s kit is being replaced, but this will all be done in your normal operating hours, and with only minimal disruption – there may be a possible short time offline.

 Digital Transformation

We have just published the first edition of ‘Digital Download’, a new ‘magazine’ for the transformation programme. In this first issue we take a step back to remind ourselves what the Programme is all about and how it's helping us to deliver against our Strategic Blueprint, as well as an update on what we've been up to recently. There'll be a new issue every couple of months. 

Read our first issue & watch the video.

Branch to Agency conversions

Since the last update, Morley branch has reopened as an agency (our 112^th) with an existing proprietor Haighwood Financial Services taking on a second agency. There are plans in place for more conversions in October, November and into 2022.

As ever if you have any feedback in relation to the content of the digest please let me know.

Catch up again at the end of October.

Thanks

Dave