Chorley Building Society completes TCS core banking migration

Chorley Building Society has completed the migration of its core banking and mortgage-lending systems to technology supplied by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), according to a report published by FinTech Futures on 2 October 2026. The Lancashire-based mutual, founded in 1859, says the move to TCS BaNCS for core banking and the TCS Digital Home Lending Solution for mortgage origination is intended to improve the experience of members, customers and the mortgage brokers who bring it most of its lending business.

For a society of Chorley's size, a core-system replacement is a significant and consequential undertaking. A core banking platform sits at the centre of how a lender manages accounts and processes new business, and replacing one affects many parts of day-to-day operations. The completion matters to three groups in particular: Chorley's savers and borrowers, who may see changes to their digital banking; the mortgage intermediaries who submit the large majority of Chorley's lending; and anyone assessing how smaller UK mutuals cope with the cost and risk of modernising ageing technology.

Chorley's own account of the project, reported by FinTech Futures from a company statement, frames the migration as a step towards better broker experiences, stronger member digital engagement and greater responsiveness to changing needs. Those are the society's stated intentions. No outcome data accompanying the completion report has been made public.

What has actually migrated

Chorley announced its partnership with TCS on 17 December 2024. The scope set out then covered three elements: TCS BaNCS for core banking, the TCS Digital Home Lending Solution for mortgage origination, and a mobile app. The October 2026 completion report, as covered by FinTech Futures, confirms that the core banking and mortgage-lending migration is finished, but it refers only to TCS BaNCS and the Digital Home Lending Solution. It does not say whether the mobile app included in the original scope has launched.

That is not evidence that the app has been dropped. It may simply not have been mentioned in the completion statement. But readers should treat its delivery status as unconfirmed until Chorley or TCS says otherwise.

Several other operational details of the migration have not been disclosed: the contract value, the hosting model, whether the cutover was a single switch or a phased rollout, any planned or unplanned downtime, data-reconciliation results, or post-launch incident figures. The platform should not be assumed to be cloud-based, and the migration should not be assumed to have gone without incident, in the absence of confirmation either way.

What members and brokers are told to expect

Chorley's framing, both in the 2026 completion statement and in language used around the original 2024 announcement, points to a better digital channel for members and a smoother journey for the mortgage intermediaries who refer business to it. Its annual report for the period to 3 February 2025 records that the society viewed its previous core technology as approaching end of life, and that replacing it should provide a better member digital channel and improve the experience of members, customers and mortgage intermediaries.

These are the society's expected benefits rather than independently measured results. No figures have been published for mortgage decision times, application processing speed, straight-through processing rates, broker workload, digital adoption or member satisfaction before and after the migration. A reader should not treat "improved experience" as a demonstrated outcome until Chorley or an independent source publishes measures of it.

The broker channel carries particular weight for Chorley. As at 3 February 2025, the Building Societies Association recorded that 87% of Chorley's mortgage sales distribution ran through intermediaries, with 13% direct. Any change to how brokers submit cases, track progress or receive decisions affects the bulk of the society's new lending.

Why Chorley replaced its core system

Chorley's 2025 annual report states plainly that the technology underpinning its core operations was approaching end of life.

The scale of the business undertaking this change is modest. For the 52 weeks to 3 February 2025, Chorley reported total assets of £427.5m and net mortgage balances of £322.6m.

Chorley attributed the swing from a £0.37m profit to a £0.18m loss mainly to core IT transformation costs. Its 2025 annual report also anticipated a further year of significant transformation spending in 2025/26. The total cost of the full programme, beyond the amounts disclosed for the single reporting year, has not been published.

On membership, there is a discrepancy worth flagging. FinTech Futures reported Chorley as having around 28,000 members as of December 2025. The Building Societies Association's 2025/26 Yearbook separately records Chorley's total membership at 12,039 as at 3 February 2025 — made up of 10,451 investing members and 1,870 borrowing members, with some overlap between the two — while describing a circa 28,000 figure in terms of customers rather than members. The two terms are not interchangeable in a building society's statutory reporting, and this article uses "customers" for the 28,000 figure pending clarification from Chorley.

A familiar problem for smaller mutuals

Chorley's position reflects a pattern identified in 2021 research hosted by the Building Societies Association: more than 90% of financial services firms surveyed relied on legacy technology in some form, and technology change was linked to 24% of high-severity customer-facing incidents in the same research. Respondents cited budget constraints (60%) and legacy system complexity (57%) as barriers to adopting newer technology. These figures date from 2021 and should not be read as current 2026 conditions, but they describe the structural pressures of legacy complexity, budget constraints and technology-change risk that smaller mutuals such as Chorley operate under.

The risk that comes with the upgrade

The Financial Conduct Authority's 2025 strategy letter for building societies acknowledges that technology modernisation can improve efficiency, data quality and customer experience. It also warns that the same projects can create execution risks, weaken operational resilience, or cause business interruption. The FCA has been explicit that building societies remain primarily responsible and accountable for resilience risks that arise from arrangements with third-party technology suppliers — the regulator does not treat outsourcing the work as outsourcing the accountability.

UK operational-resilience rules, which apply to building societies, took effect on 31 March 2022. In-scope firms had until 31 March 2025 to complete the mapping and testing needed to demonstrate that their important business services could remain within their impact tolerances during disruption. That deadline sits in the same period as Chorley's transformation programme, though the packet does not establish how the two intersect for Chorley specifically.

The FCA has also said that building societies expanding digital account provision must avoid foreseeable harm to digitally excluded customers and those in vulnerable circumstances. Nothing in the available reporting suggests Chorley is closing branches or compelling members onto digital-only channels, but the expectation is a relevant backdrop to any society presenting its new platform as a digital upgrade.

None of this is evidence that Chorley's migration encountered problems. It is general regulatory context explaining why a "completed migration" headline is the start of the oversight question, not the end of it. For a sense of what can go wrong in large bank technology migrations, the Prudential Regulation Authority's final notice to TSB Bank — issued on 20 December 2022 following a separate 2018 migration programme, with an £18.9m penalty after a 30% settlement discount — sets out the kind of governance and outsourcing failings regulators have previously found. It is cited here purely as sector risk context; it says nothing about Chorley's project.

What to watch next

The public record so far rests on a secondary report of a company statement, not a first-party release from Chorley or TCS, and it leaves open several questions that matter to members and brokers: whether the mobile app from the original 2024 scope has launched, what cutover method was used and whether there was any service interruption, whether member and mortgage records were fully reconciled, and what the total programme cost came to beyond the £0.9m disclosed for the year to 3 February 2025.

Readers wanting the current, official position on Chorley's services should go to Chorley Building Society's own site rather than third-party commentary, and the society's next annual report should be the place to look for confirmation of the final transformation cost and any measurable change in service. The FCA's building society supervisory material, including its strategy letters and operational-resilience rules, remains the primary source for how the regulator expects firms like Chorley to manage technology-change risk.