… not really, because of the scale and spread of both businesses.
More “IT people” does not equate to a cooler app.
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The scale is very similar in terms of the numbers if customers.
Mind you, I was once on a team of three in NI when the corresponding team in GB was thirty. That was for a functionally identical system too. That was just the dev teams - obviously the ops teams needed to be different sizes.
Development effort does not scale elastically in that direction tho. More features/products, more devs. Co-op Bank have a product range multiple times wider than Coventry BS offer.
Co-op Bank is also a clearing bank which means they have to support a load of activity which Coventry BS leave to HSBC. This will require resource, despite the fact it’ll be invisible to customers merely comparing apps.
Finally, despite Coventry BS having a similar number of customers I would guess there are far fewer using their app/online servicing than Co-op Bank, and those that do probably use the app far less often than an average Co-op Bank app/online user; purely because people tend to check their savings and mortgage less often than their current accounts and credit cards; set and forget vs stuff you might actually want to monitor.
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Yes, there will be things like the treasury function that is mainly a CoOp thing. My thinking is that they will bring payment processing in-house rather than sticking with HSBC and that could complicate things.
Who knows, maybe Nationwide/Virgin will be the first to be fully integrated. That said, I still think Coventry will surprise us.
There is only Nationwide at the top tier now.
Coventry (and Yorkshire) are definitely mid-tier.
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I think integration between both groups is going to be a slow process over several years.
Coventry for instance only released their app at a start of this year, while Virgin is well known to be running multiple different systems due to its history
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It really depends what you mean by fully integrated. By some measures BOS and Lloyds Bank are not fully integrated - they operate with a common system but separate licenses and (mostly) separate branches - I know BOS branded branches allegedly will do some limited Lloyds Bank account servicing but Halifax and Lloyds are totally separate.
They do however co-exist on the same backend, and share contact centres and more or less everything else.
This is the destination for both these “integrations” eventually I reckon; neither will be able to fully mutualise their assets.
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Completes on New Years Day. Both will operate separately for a period they expect with take “several years”.