“You can't be a COO in the 21st century and not be ‘tech major’, ‘ops minor’
“There’s a lot of hype,” reflects Nationwide COO Suresh Viswanathan: “You know, [solving] world hunger, cancer; there's a way to go on that...”
Viswanathan is, of course, talking about generative AI (what else).
He’s commendably frank about what it can’t do yet.
That includes magicking away technical debt, despite a shiny wealth of products and services from consultancies, hyperscalers and SaaS vendors alike that suggests it can: “We’re not relying only on LLMs” he tells The Stack, referring to how Nationwide is using voice analysis in its call centres.
This seems particularly pertinent given the COO’s ongoing platform modernisation efforts at Nationwide – the world’s largest building society.
Nationwide first opened its doors in 1884. Like most storied financial service firms, it has a wealth of “legacy” systems and has been undergoing a major digital transformation under Viswanathan’s leadership.
“Hard yards”
Viswanathan says bluntly that when he joined three years ago his initial assessment of Nationwide’s technology landscape would have put it “in the bottom half of most league tables".
“Technology modernization takes time, it doesn't happen in an instant,” he says – it is often a case of “unwinding the combined intellectual property of the firm over 20, 30 years… Despite all the cool talk you hear in the press about GenAI and how you migrate from old to new, the reality on the ground is it takes a lot of hard yards for us to move”, the COO adds.
