Wez Worland, Chief Delivery Officer at Trustmarque, discusses how mutual trust and shared values hold the key to the company’s successful partnership with Coventry Building Society

Business relationships can be easy to find but challenging to retain. 

It takes both parties being aligned and willing to work through hurdles together for the relationship to thrive long-term.  

Trustmarque knows this very well. Founded in 1987, Trustmarque is a trusted partner to customers and technology vendors with its advice and technical know-how helping customers acquire and adopt innovative technology to deliver real-life impact.  

And one of Trustmarque’s most important relationships is Coventry Building Society. Having developed the alliance over the past seven years, Trustmarque plays an influential role in propelling the Society toward growth and innovation. Wez Worland is the Chief Delivery Officer at Trustmarque and helps oversee the relationship. He is full of praise for how the partnership has evolved and stresses Coventry Building Society is one of his organisation’s most strategic customers.  

“We love working with Coventry Building Society because as we invest in them, they also invest in us,” he reveals. “I’ll always remember a conversation I had with the Chief Information and Digital Officer Jayne Showell, and she mentioned we solve problems together, we’re honest, transparent, and we work through our issues. I thought this was a powerful and refreshing way to move away from that kind of blame culture. This way of working has allowed us to move forward as one and resolve issues as quickly and as efficiently as possible.” 

Trustmarque has embedded itself within CBS’s procurement processes and driven operational efficiencies through challenging circumstances – even resulting in a £135,000 saving on software tail spend in the past 12 months. Having been involved in the first-ever workshop with Coventry Building Society in 2017, Worland believes one of the highlights was working with the Society on its joint implementation of Microsoft 365 services. “This enhanced their colleague experience, helping their users adopt the latest technology, making them more efficient and helping develop that secure posture internally, but ultimately helping users get a more positive experience.” 

Shared values are an important ingredient to every partnership that can stand the test of time. For Worland, he believes this is where the Trustmarque and Coventry Building Society relationship shines. He recalls sitting down for dinner with Coventry Building Society’s CEO Steve Hughes where Hughes explained how he personally met every single new starter that joined and how communities were supported. “It was from there where I could see we aligned perfectly and had those shared values which are so important,” says Worland. “We’ve always worked on the mantra that trust is hard to build but easy to break. We’ve had to make sure over the years that we’ve maintained our trust.” 

Looking ahead, Worland is enthusiastic about the future of the alliance. “I’d love the relationship to be even more symbiotic,” he says. “We would love to be supporting the Society on their future roadmap and vision because we want to be an extension of them. From a technology perspective, we want to be seen as a thought leader to Coventry Building Society in the areas of data and AI. As Coventry Building Society would say, ‘All together, better’.”  

Click here to read more about Coventry Building Society’s journey towards operational transformation, ESG leadership, and positioning procurement as a creator of social value and community engagement.

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