Fintech suppliers

These are the stages of our onboarding process and what you can expect when you’re joining us as a fintech partner:

We welcome expressions of interest from potential fintech partners

At this stage we’ll ask you to complete a simple Due Diligence questionnaire. Your answers allow us to ensure that you are a good fit with us as a values-led organisation. The results of Due Diligence are used to inform best next steps in the engagement. It is possible that our engagement could pause or stop at this stage.

To ensure that ideas, intellectual property or competitive information we share stays private we may ask you to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (an NDA). This protects your interests as well as Nationwide’s.

We’ll complete an initial risk assessment which looks at the risks inherent in the service or solution you’re offering. This will reflect the scope and nature of what we’re working on. For example, the assessment will draw out any use of data and whether you will access any of Nationwide’s systems or resources. We need to take the right steps to protect our member, customer and employee interests by identifying anything that could cause harm. Only by understanding these risks can we manage them and move forward safely.

We have a standard light touch contract for this, and will simply need to agree scope, deliverables, timescales and costs to proceed. Keeping the contract simple reduces the legal complexity and allows us to more quickly start the project.

At this stage we’ll complete our full Due Diligence activity on you both as a supplier to Nationwide, and by looking at the specifics of the service or solution you offer. For example, the resilience of any hosting environment a solution sits within will be checked by our IT teams, and our information security experts will look to be assured of the safe treatment of any data in scope. Service resilience and certainty that our member, customer and employee needs are protected is at the heart of this activity. The results of Due Diligence are used to inform best next steps in the engagement. It is possible that our engagement could pause or stop at this stage.

We’ll also revisit and refresh our initial risk assessment and identify any additional protections we may need to put in place.

At this point the contractual requirements and commercial requirements are dependent on the nature of the pilot, and hence will have to be managed on a per-project basis. If the pilot starts to touch Nationwide members, data, systems or brand then our risk increases, as do our regulatory and fiduciary requirements.

Before we scale, we need to update our understanding of the risks inherent in what we’re doing so that any contractual and operational protections are built-in, allowing things to move ahead at pace when the time comes.

At this stage we’ll revisit and refresh our pilot risk assessment to identify any additional contractual or operational protections we may need in place. The potential impacts of defects in, or failure of the service or solution in the live environment, need to be articulated and protections must be designed in. The way Nationwide will monitor service performance must be effective, and the data you provide needs to enable this.

Nationwide will periodically review the service to satisfy itself that it is designed and operating as agreed.

At this point you will become a full supplier to Nationwide with all of the commercial and contractual obligations that this entails.

Fintech firms can use the contact form below to express an interest in working with Nationwide. Unfortunately, as we receive so many, we are unable to respond to all.

If you’re a supplier and wish to sell us a product or service, please instead visit our Third Party Portal.

Nationwide will use the information you provide to assess your suitability as a potential partner and to contact you if we’d like to find out more about your proposition. Please don’t include any information which you consider to be confidential or commercially sensitive.