Coventry Building Society and Atos unveil programme to support digital transformation

Coventry Building Society selected Atos to design, build and migrate its business-critical application to the new flexible ‘hybrid cloud’ infrastructure across secure data centres and Amazon Web Services. The infrastructure together with a new cloud operating model enables Coventry Building Society to accelerate digital initiatives to maintain product and customer experience differentiation to the society’s 1.85 million members.

The programme migrated business critical savings and mortgage systems and applications without any unplanned disruption to service; achieved through joint collaboration to create a solid foundation of new environments to support operations and future developments.

“Having a new hybrid data centre platform in the United Kingdom not only allows us to continue to provide superior products and services to our members, it reduces risk and accelerates agile digital developments to our colleagues and members to meet changing needs,” said James Fellows, Chief Information Officer at Coventry Building Society.

“Migrating a complex legacy estate requires considerable scale, expertise and effort. The deep experience of Atos using proven migration processes and deployment of best-of-breed technologies saw them and the Coventry Building Society team manage the end-to-end process with predictability and minimal service impact.”

James added that throughout the pandemic, the Society has had to keep the whole organisation running as normal to give members access to savings and mortgages. At the same time, its offices could not be used while the government’s work from home advice was in force.

From the outset, Atos responded immediately to work side-by-side with Society engineers to accelerate key aspects of the data centre programme, moving 1,200 additional Coventry Building Society colleagues to work safely and securely from home at minimal notice. 

Clay Van Doren, CEO Northern Europe, Atos said: “This is a tremendous example of a highly collaborative partnership from inception to completion leading to wholesale renewal of Coventry Building Society’s digital infrastructure. This milestone will act as a catalyst for accelerated digital transformational activity which is a hugely exciting prospect.” 

The infrastructure transformation programme conformed to all Prudential Regulation Authority criteria while the new energy-efficient and cloud-based technologies will reduce the overall carbon footprint of Coventry Building Society, contributing to its overall carbon reduction plan.