The overhaul is intended to cope with growing demand for instant digital payments and to meet upcoming regulatory changes such as ISO 20022.

Under the agreement, Form3 will deliver its account-to-account payments platform in a cloud environment, while Accenture will lead the back-end engineering effort. Through a series of phases which launched in 2022, Nationwide will migrate all types of retail payments from an on-premise platform to the Form3 cloud.

The UK building society last year was hit by

intermittent service outages

in inbound Faster Payments over a two-month period, which left customers fuming and was ascribed by Nationwide to "technical issues".

Otto Benz, payments director at Nationwide Building Society says: “We’ve seen massive growth in cashless payments in the UK, with Nationwide processing around 450 million retail transactions each year. We needed a solution that will evolve alongside our business, facilitating an increasing volume of payments whilst meeting the expectations of our customers. This project, in collaboration with Form3 and Accenture, is a major step in simplifying and strengthening our payments processing.”