building-society – Finovation

Human Touch: Why People Are Becoming the Scarcest Asset in Digital Financial Services

Right. Let me take you back twenty years, to a focus group room in Oslo.

It was 2005, and I was running consumer research for a Nordic digital transformation programme at GE Capital. Remember, this was pre-iPhone, pre-app – “digital” still meant a website and a password you’d written on a Post-it. One participant, when asked about managing his finances online, said something that has stuck with me for two decades. Yes, he said, he did the basic stuff online – checking balances, simple payments. But for anything more complex, he wanted – and I quote – “the human touch, as Bruce Springsteen would call it.”

The room laughed. I wrote it down (I’m also a Springsteen fan!). And here we are, twenty years, several technology revolutions, and a few trillion pounds of digital transformation spend later – and that gentleman in Oslo has turned out to be a better forecaster than most of the strategy houses.

Springsteen released Human Touch in 1992 – a song about wanting just a little of that human touch in a world that feels increasingly distant. He wasn’t singing about banking. But he might as well have been writing the strategy paper for UK financial services.

We’ve spent the last few posts on this blog talking about technology – GenAI in the engine room, Martech as the translator of mutuality, the app store as the new battleground for Gen Z. And I stand by every word. The sector must digitise, and faster than it’s comfortable with.

But here’s the thing nobody puts on the transformation roadmap – the thing my Oslo participant understood instinctively in 2005: the more digital financial services becomes, the more valuable the human becomes. Not less. More. And the data increasingly suggests this isn’t a static preference – it’s a rising one.

This isn’t nostalgia talking. It’s economics. When something becomes scarce, its value goes up. And right now, genuine human interaction in UK financial services is becoming very scarce indeed.

The Digital Job Is (Mostly) Done

First, let’s be clear about where we are. The digital shift isn’t coming – it’s happened.

Around 87% of UK adults – roughly 47 million people – now use online or mobile banking in some form.
The share of UK adults holding a digital-only bank account has gone from 9% in 2019 to around 40% in 2025. That’s not a trend; that’s a landslide.
For everyday tasks – checking a balance, moving money, paying a bill – self-service is now simply how Britain banks.

So the “should we go digital?” debate is over. Anyone still having it has already lost. The interesting question – the strategic question – is what happens to the human in all of this.

What the Data Actually Says About Humans

Here’s where it gets interesting, because the survey data tells a far more nuanced story than “digital wins, humans lose.”

FICO’s UK Bank Customer Experience Survey found that while a good app now ranks above a nearby branch as the most important factor in choosing a primary banking provider, 80% of consumers said being able to talk to a real person was important to them. Not 80% of pensioners. 80% of everyone.

And the stat that should be pinned to every boardroom wall in the sector: just over half of 18–24 year olds rated the importance of human contact a full five out of five. The generation we keep assuming wants to live entirely inside an app values human access almost as much as the over-65s do.

The same research found 64% of people believe customer service is as important as the products themselves – and over a fifth think it’s more important. Read that again. A chunk of the market would take a slightly worse rate with brilliant human service over a slightly better rate with none.

Accenture’s global consumer study (49,000 respondents, so not a small sample) adds the texture: most people now use their bank’s digital channels for quick, functional tasks only. The channels work – but in Accenture’s rather brutal phrase, they’re “functionally correct but emotionally devoid.” Efficient, yes. Relationship-building, no. Meanwhile, two-thirds of consumers say they like seeing a branch in their neighbourhood because it signals their provider is stable and there – and that sentiment holds across every age group.

The pattern, in one line: people want digital for the everyday, and humans for the moments that matter. Not digital or human. Digital and human, each doing what it does best.

Is the Human Touch Actually Becoming More Important?

This is the question worth pausing on, because “humans still matter” and “humans matter more than they used to” are very different claims. In my view, the evidence points to the second – for four reasons.

1. AI fatigue is now a measurable thing. Industry research in late 2025 started putting a name to something many of us have felt: consumers are hitting a wall with digital experiences that feel automated, generic, and tone-deaf. “Personalisation at scale” built purely on algorithms is falling flat – people want authenticity, not an algorithm pretending to know them. Tellingly, the institutions reported to be gaining momentum from this are community-rooted ones: credible digital tools, backed by real humans. Sound like anyone we know?

2. The supply of humans has collapsed, and demand hasn’t. Banks and building societies have closed close to 6,800 branches since 2015; a third of all UK branches have gone in just five years, leaving roughly one branch per 10,000 people (France has nearly five). Accenture found that 44% of 18–44 year olds had problems getting human support when they actually needed it. When demand holds steady and supply collapses, the value of what’s left rises. That’s not sentiment; that’s a market.

3. AI is raising the stakes of trust, not lowering them. As AI takes over more of the routine, what’s left for humans is precisely the high-stakes, high-emotion work – and consumers are explicit that they want human accountability there. Recent consumer research found that even among heavy AI users, banks and people remain far more trusted for actual financial decisions than the technology itself. The more decisions machines inform, the more people want a human to ownthem.

4. The complex moments aren’t going away – they’re growing. Affordability stress, later-life lending, vulnerability, bereavement, self-employment, fraud recovery. Consumer Duty has made human-quality support for these moments a regulatory expectation, not a nice-to-have. The volume of “moments that matter” is rising just as the industry’s capacity to handle them humanly is shrinking.

So yes – I’d argue the human touch is genuinely appreciating in value, in the proper investment sense of the word. Which makes the next question obvious: who’s positioned to capture that value?

The Cautionary Tale Next Door: SME Banking Ran This Experiment First

If you want to know how the consumer story ends, look at business banking – because the SME market ran the “strip out the humans” experiment a decade ahead of retail. And the results are in.

Through the 2010s, the big banks systematically withdrew relationship managers from small and medium-sized businesses. Personal support was reserved for large corporates; everyone else got a call centre and a portal. The consequences:

Research found almost two-thirds (65%) of UK SMEs were unable to get access to a senior decision-maker at the Big Four banks. Not “found it slow” – unable.
Accenture’s UK SME banking research found that while 72% of SMEs say their business positively needs digital banking, only around a quarter would give up their relationship manager for a digital-only alternative — even if it were cheaper. The human relationship survived a price test. Very few things in banking survive a price test.
A quarter of SMEs now hold their main bank account outside the Big Four, with even more placing deposits and borrowing elsewhere.

And here’s the punchline. The fastest-growing fintech in UK history – Allica Bank – built its entire proposition on reintroducing the relationship manager, armed with modern technology. A dedicated human for every established business customer, nearly tripling its RM network at the very moment the high street banks were still removing theirs, and billions in lending and deposits to show for it. Their pitch, almost word for word: business banking how it used to be, just better.

Let that sink in: in 2025, the most disruptive idea in UK business banking was a person who knows your name – delivered on a modern tech stack.

The lesson for retail: SME banking proves that when incumbents withdraw the human, customers don’t simply adapt and forget. They wait, they grumble, and then they move the moment someone offers tech plus touch. The consumer market is earlier in the same cycle – and mutuals get to choose which side of it they’re on.

The comparison is instructive in another way too. In SME banking, the human need is continuous – a business’s affairs are complex enough that the relationship itself is the product. In consumer banking, the need is episodic – concentrated in a handful of life moments. That actually makes the consumer version cheaper to deliver well: you don’t need an RM per member, you need brilliantly accessible humans at the moments that matter, funded by ruthless digitisation of everything else. Which, conveniently, is exactly the operating model a branch-holding mutual already has.

The Scarcity Play

This is where building societies’ position gets genuinely interesting.

Building societies now account for around 30% of all high street branches – more than double the 14% share held in 2012. Not because societies suddenly opened hundreds of branches, but because they kept theirs while everyone else left. And the sector holds roughly £490 billion of mortgage assets (31% of UK mortgage lending) and £485 billion of retail savings per the Bank of England’s latest Mutuals Landscape report – so this isn’t a cottage industry hanging onto branches out of sentiment. It’s a quarter of the savings market making a deliberate strategic choice.

In my experience, scarcity is the most underrated marketing force there is. When every other provider’s “contact us” journey ends in a chatbot loop, the institution where a member can sit down with an actual person isn’t offering legacy infrastructure. It’s offering a premium product.

The Trap to Avoid: Humans as a Cost Line

Here’s my worry for the sector. Under margin pressure, the temptation is to treat people as the expensive bit of the operating model and digital as the cheap bit – and to “transform” by swapping one for the other.

That’s the big banks’ playbook. SME banking shows exactly where it leads, and it has handed challengers a once-in-a-generation differentiator. Copying it would be strategic self-harm.

The smarter framing – and the one I’d put in front of any board – is this: digital exists to make the human moments better, not rarer. Every pound spent automating the routine should be explicitly reinvested in the quality of the human interaction. Automate the form-filling so the adviser spends the appointment advising. Use the data so the colleague already knows the member’s story before they sit down. That’s not digital versus human. That’s digital funding human. It’s the Allica (and also HandelsBanken) model, and it’s the model the mutual sector was practically born for.

The 2008 lesson applies here too: the institutions that invested through adversity came out the other side stronger. The same logic applies to people. The societies that protect and upskill their human capability through this margin squeeze – rather than cutting it to fund the tech – will own the most defensible position in UK retail finance: the provider that’s brilliantly digital and genuinely human.

The ‘So What?’

Three things, if you’re sitting in a society today:

Stop apologising for your branches and your people. Reposition them. They’re not a legacy cost – they’re a premium service the rest of the market has abandoned, and 80% of consumers say they want it. SME banking has already proven customers will move for it.
Get the digital basics flawless, fast. The human premium only works if the everyday digital experience is competitive. A clunky onboarding flow or app doesn’t make your humans look valuable; it makes your whole institution look slow.
Measure the human, not just the digital. We obsess over app ratings and digital adoption. Start measuring access to humans at the moments that matter – speed to a real person, quality of complex conversations, outcomes for vulnerable members. What gets measured gets protected.

The neobanks have spent a decade proving you can build a bank without branches. SME challengers are now spending this decade proving the opposite case: that the winning model is tech plus touch. And belonging – membership, mutuality, being known – is the one product this sector has always sold.

Twenty years ago, a man in an Oslo focus group told me exactly how this would play out: digital for the basics, the human touch – as Bruce Springsteen would call it – for everything that matters. Two decades of transformation spend later, the data has finally caught up with him. The Boss had it right, and so did he. We’ve never been better placed to provide that human touch. We just need the digital plumbing to match.

Feel free to disagree, agree or suggest alternative views – happy to hear them all.

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Future-Proofing Mutuality: Why UK Building Societies Can’t Afford to Ignore Technology

Hello everyone, and thanks for joining me again. As many of you know, I’ve recently changed jobs and am now leading marketing for a UK building society. It’s an exciting move, and I’ll be using this blog as a space to also share what I’m learning, thinking about, focusing on the unique and fascinating UK building society sector, along with the regular topics I post about.

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with them, you might be asking: what exactly is a building society?

Simply put, a UK building society is a financial institution that’s owned by its members. Unlike a commercial bank, which is owned by external shareholders, our members are the people who have a savings account or a mortgage with us. This fundamental difference in ownership shapes our entire purpose. Instead of just chasing profits to pay dividends, our main goal is to look after the best interests of our members.

Purpose and History

The core of a building society is to help people buy homes and provide a safe place to save. They’ve been doing this for a long time. The history of building societies goes all the way back to the late 18th century, when groups of people would literally pool their savings together to help each other build houses. The idea was simple: when enough money was saved, one person would get a loan to build a home. Once everyone had a home, the group would dissolve.

This model evolved into the “permanent societies” we know today, which stay open indefinitely, constantly welcoming new members. While we’ve expanded our services, our core structure remains the same:

Member Ownership: If you have a savings or mortgage account with us, you’re a member.
One Member, One Vote: No matter how much money you have, every member gets one vote at our Annual General Meeting. It’s a truly democratic model, giving members a real say in how the society is run.
No External Shareholders: Because we don’t have outside shareholders to please, we can reinvest our profits to offer better interest rates on savings and lower rates on mortgages.

This mutual model isn’t just a British thing. Similar institutions, like credit unions in the US and cooperative banks across Europe, and across Asia, share the same core principle of being member-owned. They might have different names and slightly different rules, but their purpose is the same: to put members before profits.

The Digital Challenge: Why It’s Not Just About Members

In a world where digital-first banks and agile fintechs are everywhere, building societies face a serious challenge. While we still hold a huge portion of the nation’s savings and mortgages (asset base of £648.3 billion) and have a great high-street presence (30% of all high street branches), our digital experience often lags behind.

Recent research highlights a clear gap between what members expect and what is often delivered. A study by Moneyhub found that nearly half of building society members reported difficulties engaging with services, with the digital experience being a frequent pain point. Furthermore, for younger generations (aged 18-34), an easy-to-use mobile app is the second-most important factor when choosing a financial provider.

Almost half of building society members have reported difficulties with digital services, and for younger generations, a top-notch mobile app and a good digital experience is a deal-breaker. But it’s more than just a direct-to-member problem. We also have to consider our crucial partners:

Intermediaries and Brokers: If a broker finds our online portal clunky or slow, they’re more likely to take their business to a competitor. We need to make their lives easier, not harder.
Our Own Branches: Our branch teams are our brand ambassadors. When they’re bogged down with outdated systems, it takes time away from what they do best: providing personalised, human-centric service.

The pressure to modernise is real. And it’s particularly tough for smaller societies that don’t have the multi-billion-pound budgets of the big players like Nationwide. How can a smaller society with limited resources develop an app that competes with a Starling or a Monzo? How can we attract top tech talent away from big-city Fintechs? These are the questions keeping many of us up at night.

Technology: Our Secret Weapon

Here’s the thing: technology is not the enemy. It’s our best friend when it comes to preserving our mutual values. It’s about using technology to free up our people to do what they do best—provide brilliant, human-centred service.

1. Data & Personalisation: Thanks to things like Open Banking, we have access to a huge amount of data (with member consent, of course!). This allows us to move away from generic communications and offer truly personalised advice and products. For example, we can analyse a member’s spending to suggest a savings plan that actually works for their lifestyle. It’s about being a genuine partner, not just another bank.

2. AI & Automation: I know our branch staff and our intermediary teams are our greatest assets. They provide the personal service that defines us. But what if they could spend less time on paperwork and more time building relationships? That’s what AI can do. By automating tasks like mortgage underwriting or reporting, we can free up our people to have more meaningful conversations. This is how we can deliver a level of service that no automated bank can match.

As a marketer in this sector, seeing these ideas in practice makes all the difference. AI and automation are no longer just for the back office; they’re becoming essential tools for us, too. They can help us be more effective in several ways:

Smarter Content Creation: AI can help us brainstorm blog post ideas, write social media captions, or even draft the first version of an email campaign. This frees up my team to focus on the strategic side of things.

Hyper-Personalised Campaigns: This is where AI truly shines for a building society. Instead of just segmenting our members by age or postcode, we can use AI to analyse their data to create a genuinely hyper-personalisedcampaign. We could automatically send a potential first-time buyer a tailored email with tips on saving for a deposit, or offer a loyal saver a new interest rate before they even think about looking elsewhere.
Faster Performance Analysis: Running a marketing campaign used to involve a huge amount of manual data crunching. Now, AI-powered tools can analyse campaign performance in real-time, telling us which ads are working and which aren’t. We can then adjust our spending and messaging on the fly, ensuring every pound we spend on marketing is working as hard as possible.

A New Era of Scale

The UK building society sector is already demonstrating a powerful understanding of how to use scale to invest in technology. The recent acquisitions of Virgin Money by Nationwide Building Society and The Co-operative Bank by Coventry Building Society are excellent examples.

These mergers are not simply about increasing market share; they are about creating the scale and capital needed to invest in digital platforms, modernise legacy systems, and compete with large retail banks on their own terms. By growing their asset base, these societies are able to fund the significant technological transformation required to attract and retain the next generation of members. They are proving that mutuality and modernisation can thrive together.

The ‘So What?’

So, what does this all mean for us?

Ultimately, the choice isn’t between tradition and technology. It’s between smart, strategic evolution and gradually becoming irrelevant. The future of our brand and our business depends on embracing this challenge head-on.

We can’t outspend the big banks, but we can definitely outsmart them. The true ‘so what’ is that our core values of trust, community, and personal service are more important than ever. We just need to use the right tools to make sure our brand is as relevant to a young first-time buyer as it is to our most loyal savers. Our digital future isn’t about becoming a big bank; it’s about becoming a better building society for everyone.

Ready to discuss? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or what you’d like me to deep-dive into next. Let me know in the comments or drop me a note!