Unifying Platform & People for Principality Building Society

The Potential

‍‍Principality Building Society (PBS) is the largest building society in Wales and the sixth largest in the UK and a mutual with deep roots, ambitious growth goals and a strong community focus. But its digital experience wasn’t keeping pace. An over-complex, inflexible Sitecore platform was slowing everything down: marketing agility, the rollout of new journeys, routine product updates and everyday optimisation. On top of this, PBS’s digital capability was spread across six separate teams, each working to its own priorities. That fragmentation made it hard to move as one organisation, respond quickly to changing customer needs, or maintain a clear, consistent experience across the estate.

PBS didn’t just need a new website. It needed a modern, mobile-first digital platform and a new way of working that could turn customer intent into applications and appointments and keep delivering value long after launch.

The Insight

For savings and mortgage customers, the relationship with a building society now starts online. People expect their provider to feel as intuitive and reassuring as the apps they use every day, especially when they are comparing products, checking eligibility, or arranging a branch appointment. If journeys are clunky, pages are slow or information feels out of date, customers don’t wait, they go elsewhere.

But that level of responsiveness doesn’t come from swapping one content management system for another. It comes from aligning platform, people and process around the same ambition. In PBS’s case, the real opportunity lay in doing both at once: migrating away from an over-engineered Sitecore implementation to a simpler, smarter Kentico Xperience 13 platform, while reshaping the digital function into a single, joined-up delivery engine that could move at the pace of its customers.

The Idea

Our idea was to redesign Principality’s digital estate around the people who use it, and the teams who run it. To achieve that, Brand Potential led a dual-track transformation. On one track, we re-platformed and reimagined the public website on Kentico Xperience 13, creating a mobile-first, conversion-ready experience for savings, mortgages and branch appointments. On the other, we rebuilt the operating model from the inside out, embedding one of our Digital Transformation Specialists into PBS to unify six siloed teams into a single agile digital delivery function.

Rather than treating technology and organisation as separate work streams, we held them together under one roadmap. As the Kentico experience came to life, we worked with PBS’s digital, marketing, IT and compliance teams to introduce shared tools, clearer processes and agile ceremonies, so that by the time the new site went live, a new way of working was already in place. The aim was simple: a better site and a better system for improving it, launched together.

The Technology

At the heart of the change was a deliberate technology shift: moving from an inflexible, over-engineered Sitecore platform to a leaner, more agile Kentico Xperience 13 digital experience platform. The legacy Sitecore build had become a blocker. It was complex to maintain, slow to change and heavily dependent on development resource for even simple updates. Each new campaign, rate change or journey tweak came with friction and risk, making it harder forPBS to respond quickly to the market or to evolving customer expectations.

Brand Potential recommended Kentico Xperience 13 to change that dynamic. Kentico’s marketer-friendly interface, flexible page templates and reusable components give PBS’s teams the ability to launch campaigns, refresh product pages and test new journeys at speed, without relying on lengthy development cycles. A simpler underlying architecture has dramatically reduced technical overhead while improving reliability; the new Kentico-powered site has almost eliminated 404s and JavaScript errors and has helped cut the overall bounce rate to 21%.

Crucially, Kentico Xperience 13 offers the balance of power and control that a regulated financial services brand requires. It enables personalisation, marketing automation and integration with existing systems, while still supporting PBS’s compliance, security and governance needs. By migrating away from Sitecore onto Kentico Xperience 13, PBS now has a digital experience platform that can grow with the organisation – supporting new products, evolving customer journeys and deeper data-driven optimisation. Technology alone didn’t deliver the transformation, but this move from Sitecoreto Kentico gave PBS exactly the kind of platform Brand Potential’s unified digital team could build momentum on.

The Impact

The combined platform and operating model shift has delivered a step-change in performance:

• +18% conversion on savings applications
• +17% conversion on mortgage enquiries
• +172% increase in branch appointment forms generated
• Bounce rate reduced to 21%
• 404 and JavaScript errors almost eliminated
• Product update cycles cut from5 days to 1

PBS has moved from firefighting issues to actively optimising journeys, with a digital estate that works harder for both customers and the business.

Inside PBS, the transformation is just as visible. Six fragmented digital teams have been brought together into one agile delivery function with shared goals, a single backlog and a much clearer sense of collective ownership. New shared tools – including Miro for mapping flows and AsanaEnterprise for planning work – have created transparency across the digital estate, so everyone can see what is being worked on, why it matters and how it is progressing.

UX, marketing, IT and compliance now work side by side rather than in sequence, with faster decisions and fewer hand-offs. The digital team is no longer dependent on external partners for every change; they are equipped to own the roadmap, test and learn in shorter cycles and keep improving the experience over time. PBS didn’t just get a new website. With Brand Potential’s support, it unlocked a digital engine – and a team – that is built for what comes next.