CASE STUDY

Optimising the house-buying process with location data and the UPRN

How Nationwide faced challenges in property assessment and responsible lending, with OS data

Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, and a prominent and responsible mortgage lender, faced the challenge of accurately assessing properties on which it was asked to lend. Ordnance Survey (OS) data has helped enhance the mortgage lending process, providing better service to customers, and ensuring the sustainability and insurability of properties.

|2 MIN READ

Challenge

Nationwide’s key issue was ensuring that properties were sustainable and insurable. Without this information, there was a risk of customers becoming emotionally attached to properties that might later be deemed unfit for mortgages or insurance, leading to disappointment, and delays in the house buying process.

Solution

Nationwide integrated Ordnance Survey data into the digital journey, focusing on the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN). The UPRN provides a unique identifier for each property at a granular level, allowing Nationwide to link various key data attributes to each property.

This integration enabled Nationwide to make swift, risk-based decisions. For example, analysing whether a property was at risk of flooding or subsidence. The UPRN allows Nationwide to assess properties quickly, then communicate with the customer, preventing potential issues later.

Result

OS data and the UPRN significantly improved Nationwide's ability to make quick and accurate lending decisions, and helped optimise the customer journey, ensuring a smoother and more efficient experience for homebuyers. This helped streamlined the mortgage approval process, reducing the likelihood of customers facing unexpected issues or disappointments regarding their chosen properties.

Nationwide has a strong relationship with OS, during which OS has assisted Nationwide in constructing the essential data infrastructure required for its digital transformation. This partnership continues to explore new data opportunities to further enhance decision-making processes as. Nationwide aims to increase both speed and accuracy of its property assessments. This will enable a faster and more reliable house buying and selling process across the UK.

"We've been working with Ordnance Survey for over seven years. It's been a really collaborative relationship; OS data is really core to what we do. As we've developed a digital journey, OS helped us build the data around that. And in the future we're looking at new data opportunities, which we think can improve our decisioning even further and optimise that customer journey."

Robert Stevens, Head of Property Risk, Nationwide Building Society

Further support

For further help about how our data can transform your organisation, contact us today

Contact us

Products and solutions featured in this study

  • AddressBase Premium

    AddressBase Premium offers full lifecycle information of a property that can be used within geographical information systems & database systems.

Find more case studies