KIRAN MAHIL - Chief Information Officer - Retail Products

Technology at the Core. People at the Heart:

Kiran Mahil on Transformation, Trust, and the Future of Mutual Banking.

Kiran Mahil has spent more than two decades at the intersection of banking and large-scale change. But talk to her for five minutes, and it becomes obvious: the transformation she cares most about is not just a digital one.

Spend a few minutes with Kiran Mahil, and something becomes clear almost immediately; her diversity of experience and relentless passion for people is what’s key to her success. As a CIO overseeing large scale modernisation at the UK’s fastest growing and most trusted banking services provider, Mahil’s approach to leadership extends beyond technology. “Technology may be the enabler”, she says, “but it is culture, inclusion, leadership, and talent development that underpin how I approach driving lasting change.” For Mahil, it is a conviction built over more than twenty years in financial services, across consulting, telecoms, and banking, spanning retail and SME transformation programmes at Lloyds, Metro Bank, and now Nationwide.

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What she is interested in is how organisations change, why most of them struggle to do so, and what it actually takes to lead the kind of transformation that lasts. At Nationwide, where she oversees core banking modernisation, for more than 17 million members, those questions are not theoretical. They are the work.

This conversation covers the strategic logic of core banking transformation, the future of modern mutuals, the cultural conditions that enable change, and why the technology sector's next generation will only be as good as the talent pipelines that support it. What runs through all of it is a particular kind of clarity: the conviction that the most important opportunities in banking technology are, at their root, human ones.

The Foundation That Everything Else Runs On

Ask Kiran Mahil what has shaped her most as a leader, and she does not point to a single programme or a particular role. She points to breadth. "Starting out, my experience in consulting, telecoms and banking provided a strong foundation and a broad perspective on both commercial and technological landscapes." That breadth was deliberate, and it has proved generative. The leaders who navigate complex transformation well are rarely the ones with the deepest expertise in a single domain. They are the ones who have seen enough different organisations, different industries, and different failure modes to recognise patterns that are invisible to those who have only ever worked in one context. Mahil developed that range early, and it shows in how she thinks.

Her career in financial services deepened that foundation with something harder to replicate: scale. More than twenty years of leading transformation programmes across retail and SME banking have given her a precise understanding of what large-scale change actually demands, not just in the strategic planning sense, but in the operational reality of delivering it. The distance between a compelling vision for transformation and a functioning core banking platform is enormous, and most of the work bridging that gap is unglamorous. Mahil has done that work.

Her current role at Nationwide has added another dimension: institutional complexity. "Navigating large-scale integration, advancing multi-channel banking, and driving platform modernisation have reinforced the importance of delivering transformation while maintaining trust." That phrase, delivering transformation while maintaining trust, is as much a design constraint as a value statement. At a mutual with 17 million members and a heritage that spans nearly two centuries, the cost of losing trust is not an abstraction. It is an existential risk.

Running alongside her technical responsibilities has been a consistent commitment she describes without the self-consciousness that sometimes accompanies these conversations: mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and championing people development initiatives. Not as side projects, but as core expressions of what she believes leadership actually is. "Throughout my journey, a commitment to people, culture, and inclusion has remained central." It is central because she believes it has to be. Everything else, the platforms, the programmes, the partnerships, runs on top of it.

Why You Cannot Wait on Core Banking

Nationwide is already well advanced on this core banking transformation journey, with Accenture as the lead systems integration partner to deliver a modern, scalable, resilient and future-ready core platform. But there is a well-worn debate in financial services about core banking transformation. It usually features some variation of the same argument: the risks are too high, the costs are too uncertain, the business case is too difficult to pin down. Better to maintain and extend what you have. Better to wait for the technology to mature, the standards to stabilise, and the organisation to be ready.

Mahil takes a different approach. "Core banking transformation is not optional. It is a strategic imperative for sustainable growth." She makes this argument not with evangelical urgency but with the precision of someone who has spent years watching what legacy inaction actually costs. The risks of transformation are real, she acknowledges: cost, complexity, organisational disruption, operating model change, and the sheer delivery challenge of changing the engine while the plane is in the air. But she places those risks alongside the alternative, and the comparison is not close.

"Legacy systems drive rising costs, constrain innovation, and increase operational risk, ultimately eroding competitiveness and market share over time."

What she is describing is a compounding structural drag. Every year a legacy system stays in place, the cost of eventually replacing it grows. The technical debt accumulates, the architectural dependencies multiply, and the gap between what the system can do and what customers expect widens.

Modern core platforms fundamentally change the calculus. They allow banks to launch products faster and integrate with third parties without the bespoke engineering that legacy architecture requires for every new connection. They enable real-time data access and AI-driven decisioning that simply are not possible when the underlying platform was designed in an era before the internet. And they shift the composition of IT spend: less absorbed by maintenance, more available for genuine innovation. "Modernisation reduces this technical debt, simplifies architecture, and shifts investment towards innovation rather than just keeping the lights on." The phrase "keeping the lights on" is deceptively small. In a large bank, the proportion of the technology budget spent on maintaining systems that should have been retired years ago is often the majority of total IT spend. That is not a technology problem. It is a strategic constraint.

Mahil's argument, made with the authority of someone who has lived it, is that the conversation about transformation has shifted. It is no longer about whether the risk is worth taking. It is about whether the organisation can afford not to.

Data, Digital, and the Mutual Advantage

The mutual model is rarely discussed as a strategic asset in technology transformation. It should be. Nationwide operates without the obligation to deliver shareholder returns. That single structural difference, easy to state and genuinely profound in its implications, shapes what the organisation can do with the data, digital infrastructure, and customer experience work that Mahil and her teams are building. "Without the burden of delivering shareholder value, we can offer features and capabilities to our customers that make banking fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society." This is not a marketing position. It is an architectural argument. When the measure of success is customer outcomes rather than quarterly earnings, the decisions about where to invest, what to prioritise, and what to build look different. Mahil has consistently made those decisions in favour of the customer experience, and the results are evident in the numbers.

Nationwide has ranked first for customer satisfaction among high street banks for more than a decade. That is not the outcome of a single initiative or a particularly inspired brand campaign. It is the cumulative result of consistent choices made at the architecture, product, and service levels to put customer experience at the centre of every decision.

Underpinning that experience is a data platform that Mahil describes as foundational to the mutual's future. "Data platforms enable organisations to move from relationship-based models to insight-led organisations, using unified, real-time data to better understand and serve customers." At Nationwide, the consolidation of data estates has created the capability to deliver more personalised, timely, and relevant services, and to make better decisions across the organisation, from credit to fraud to customer engagement.

With 17 million members. The use of generative AI has reduced customer response times from 45 minutes to 10-15 minutes. That is not a marginal improvement. It is a fundamental shift in the speed and quality of customer service, delivered at scale across an institution with 17 million members.

Digital infrastructure makes that scale possible. Cloud platforms, AI capabilities, and modern architectures give Nationwide the agility to innovate without sacrificing resilience. "Nationwide's investment in cloud and digital partnerships has enabled faster service through AI-driven automation, improved security through real-time fraud protection, and supported more than 17 million members with scalable, omnichannel services." What Mahil is building is a model in which three things work in concert: data provides the intelligence, digital infrastructure enables delivery at scale, and customer experience ensures the whole thing stays connected to purpose. Remove any one of them and the model weakens.

The mutual that combines heritage and genuine digital capability is, she argues, the most interesting institution in the market. Nationwide is doing just that.

Culture Is Not the Soft Part

There is a persistent habit in corporate transformation writing of treating culture as the final chapter, the thing you address after the platforms are built and the processes are redesigned. Mahil would recognise that habit, and she would sharply disagree with it.

"Leadership and culture are critical to overcoming the practical challenges of large-scale transformation, because ultimately, transformation is delivered by people, not just technology."

She starts with clarity. In complex organisations like Nationwide, where transformation spans multiple systems, functions, and customer journeys simultaneously, the first job of leadership is to establish a direction that everyone can orient around. A direction that is felt in decisions, in priorities, in what gets funded and what gets stopped.

"Leaders need to set a clear vision, prioritise ruthlessly, and maintain alignment at scale. Aligned to this, our partnership with Accenture is built on shared outcomes, strong alignment, transparency, and a collaborative delivery model to drive successful outcomes at scale."

Ruthless prioritisation is harder than it sounds in an organisation with genuine strategic depth. There are always compelling arguments for pursuing multiple things at once, and there is always pressure from multiple directions. The discipline of choosing, of being clear about what matters most and holding that clarity under pressure, is one of the things that distinguishes effective transformation leaders from impressive-sounding ones.

Culture, Mahil argues, determines whether strategy translates into outcomes. Successful transformation requires a culture that is collaborative, outcome-driven, and genuinely open to change rather than one that performs openness while defaulting to legacy behaviours under pressure.

At Nationwide, a customer-first mindset provides the north star. It does not resolve every trade-off, but it orients the conversation. When decisions are genuinely difficult, the question of what serves the customer best tends to cut through.

The cultural traits she returns to most consistently are ownership, transparency, and psychological safety. "Teams must feel empowered to challenge, experiment, and learn, particularly when adopting new technologies or operating models." Psychological safety in a regulated financial institution is not the same as psychological safety in a startup. The stakes are higher, the scrutiny is more intense, and the consequences of getting things wrong are more visible. Building an environment where people genuinely feel safe surfacing problems, challenging assumptions, and trying things that might not work requires sustained, deliberate leadership.

What she is describing is a leadership practice, repeated daily in every interaction and every decision about how to respond when things go wrong. "Transformation succeeds where leadership provides clarity, pace, and discipline, and culture creates engagement, adaptability, and trust." The two are not separable. You do not get one without the other.

The Pipeline Problem Nobody Is Solving Fast Enough

Kiran Mahil is unambiguous about what is at stake in the technology sector's talent pipeline debate. "We face both a structural skills shortage and a growing responsibility to design technology that is fair, resilient, and trusted." As digital systems increasingly shape access to finance, credit, and economic opportunity, the consequences of building those systems with a narrow range of perspectives, experiences, and problem-solving approaches are amplified. Bias that would be a minor flaw in a consumer app becomes a serious harm when it is embedded in a credit decision that affects someone's ability to buy a home.

Mahil has not been content to make this argument theoretically. She is building the pipelines herself. As a member of the Business Leaders Council at Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, she works directly with educators and industry partners to create job-ready pathways for early-career and underrepresented talent. She supports mid-career pivoters through partnerships with SAP Fioneer's JETS programme and Makers' Pivoting to Digital initiative, deliberately targeting people who have the relevant training and real-world experience to add immediate value. "Innovation and resilience come from teams with different perspectives, experiences and ways of solving problems. That requires moving beyond traditional hiring models and building sustainable pipelines across the full career lifecycle." The lifecycle framing matters. The technology sector has a long history of treating diversity as an entry problem and solving it at the recruitment stage while doing little about what happens next. Mahil is explicit about where that leaves you: "Diversity is not just about entry. It is about progression, retention and representation at decision-making levels." Within Nationwide, she sponsors the Women in Tech network and has developed the Elevate programme, which is specifically designed to address the structural barriers that prevent women from progressing into senior technical and leadership roles.

The Elevate programme exists because identifying the barriers is the easy part. Doing something structural about them is the work. "That is how we build a technology sector that can innovate responsibly, scale sustainably and serve society effectively." No version of responsible innovation excludes this work.

The Measure of What Lasts

Mahil carries the perspective of someone who has been in financial services long enough to distinguish between what produces impressive quarterly results and what compounds over decades.

She is building both.

Partnerships, she argues, will be increasingly central to how Nationwide and institutions like it navigate what comes next. The combination of core banking modernisation, cloud infrastructure, AI capability, and talent development is too broad and too fast-moving for any single organisation to manage alone. The partners who will matter most are the ones with the deepest alignment to outcomes.

The future she describes is one in which this modern mutual combines the heritage and institutional trust that took generations to build with the speed, personalisation, and innovation that customers now expect as a baseline. It is a demanding combination. It requires getting the platforms right, and she is doing so. It requires getting the data strategy right, and she is doing so. And it requires building a culture that can keep doing both simultaneously, under pressure, over time.

That last part, the culture, is the thing she talks about with the most intensity and the most care because she has seen enough transformations succeed and fail to know that it is decisive. "Transformation is as much about culture and people as it is about technology and platforms."

It is a conclusion she reached through evidence, and it is the thing that shapes everything else about how she leads. What Nationwide's customers experience, whether they feel understood, supported, and trusting of who they do their banking with, is the accumulated output of thousands of decisions made by the people and teams Mahil is building and leading. The platforms are the medium. The culture is the message.