How TSB grew residential lending at 2.4× the market

The challenge

Digital-first lending against bigger-budget competition

TSB needed to deliver digital-first lending experiences while competing against larger banks with bigger technology budgets, and to do it without expanding the cost base. Application turnaround had to accelerate while operational discipline held the line.

Lending technology spanned a dozen disconnected systems across core banking, bureaus, valuations, and verification. Direct customers and brokers worked through different channels, with inconsistent policy and duplicated handoffs in between.

The approach

End-to-end origination across direct and broker channels

TSB deployed Cloudcase as a single origination platform for home loans, personal loans, and credit cards, used identically across digital, branch, and broker channels. One configuration, one set of policies, one workflow.

The programme began in January 2016. Standard residential lending went live in March 2017, with personal loans and complex residential lending following over the months after. That made the year to March 2018 the first full year of residential origination on the platform.

Real-time decisioning and automated workflows gave customers status visibility from first contact through settlement. The integration platform wired Cloudcase to twelve existing systems (core banking, three bureaus, valuation services, and verification providers), connecting them without bespoke code.

“Customers benefit from real-time loan application updates and faster processing.”

The outcome

Residential lending growth at 2.4× the market

In the first full year following implementation, TSB grew residential lending at roughly 2.4 times system growth. The comparison is TSB's own: its annual report described residential lending as leading the bank's growth at nearly 2.5 times the market.

Growth continued across the following two years. Over the three years to March 2020 the residential book grew by $1.37 billion, from $3.85 billion to $5.22 billion, a 36 per cent increase.

TSB credited a broad growth strategy over this period, including national expansion, a full rebrand, and investment in mobile mortgage managers. Cloudcase's role was the origination capacity underneath it: contact-to-contract dropped to forty minutes for a simple personal loan contract, against the hour or two it took before. The work was recognised externally with Canstar Bank of the Year awards for both Home Loans and Credit Cards in 2023.

TSB now ships product and policy changes on its own cadence, with operational and audit evidence captured by the platform rather than reconstructed after the fact.