Umbraco
Case Study

Monmouthshire Building Society

Founded in 1869, Monmouthshire Building Society has been providing mortgage and savings products to the people of Monmouthshire for over 150 years. The society has continued to grow and now has 10 branches along with 14 agencies across South Wales and the South West of England. With their head office located in Friars Walk Newport, Monmouthshire Building Society pride themselves on being a friendly building society with excellent customer services. After deciding on a complete rebrand, MBS felt it was the perfect time to overhaul their existing website to create a site that reflected their true identity and a CMS which would be perfect for their business. Spindogs was up for the challenge and used Umbraco to craft the brand new solution: 

The brief

Throughout their range of local branches, Monmouthshire Building Society have built up an excellent reputation for their customer service, however they felt their online presence was lacking, and feared they may be at risk of being left behind online. 

Following a complete rebrand, MBS felt it was the perfect time to overhaul their existing website to create a site that reflected their new identity and how they wanted to showcase their brand.

Monmouthshire Building Society have two key mortgage customer types; the general public and mortgage brokers. They required a website that could provide easily accessible information that was relevant to their key audiences, as well as being responsive and allowing users to access the site across mobile and tablet devices.

The solution

The first stage of the project involved our user experience experts completing a full discovery phase, which included meeting with Monmouthshire Building Society staff and brokers as well as working with the internal marketing team to develop customer personas and an in-depth competitor analysis to gain a deeper understanding of the main website goals. 

Based on the functionality Monmouthshire Building Society wanted within their new website, Spindogs identified Umbraco CMS to be the perfect fit. Umbraco's multi site capabilities meant that they could keep both their main site and intermediaries all within one login. Umbraco's inbuilt user permissions also meant that different access permissions could be given to various team members within delegated areas of the site. 

The process for updated website content at Monmouthshire Building Society means it all needs approving internally, which is essential for compliance at a financial services organisation. In order to provide this functionality we created an authoring site, which is a direct replication of the main website, but hidden from search engines, allowing Monmouthshire Building Society to update content, agree it internally, and then push it to the live site with the click of a button. 

From our in-depth discovery, it was clear that Monmouthshire Building Society have two key mortgage customer types, the general public and mortgage brokers. We needed to ensure both these groups had access to the information that was relevant to their specific needs. Our team of talented Umbraco developers built bespoke mortgage calculators allowing MBS to easily edit these based on changes in interest rates.

The results

In total three teams worked on the account to deliver a website that would fit Monmouthshire Building Society's needs perfectly. The brand new content staging area, which also includes a payment gateway allows users to make mortgage payments directly to Monmouthshire Building Society, providing a seamless user experience. 

The new website design allows Monmouthshire Building Society to attract a range of new customers, as well as appealing directly to their key consumer groups with their bespoke website making it easier for MBS to facilitate the needs of different users.

By using Umbraco forms to bring the mortgage decision in principle form online, MBS can easily track the number of successful visits to the website by the number of forms completed.