Caroline - Corporate Responsibility

Hi I'm Caroline and I'm Head of Corporate Responsibility at Nationwide. Corporate Responsibility is all about our values and our beliefs, and its how we operate as a business. So everybody widely knows we're a responsible business and my role is to make sure in everything we do - with our products and our services and our community work - we are being absolutely responsible. We're focusing heavily on financial capability and housing as our core themes.

Obviously there's a close connection to what we do as a business there. So we're looking at people with financial difficulties, people who are struggling with debt and helping them to understand how they can get out of that. And in the housing arena, we're looking at people who need affordable housing, or sheltered housing in some form. And we're also helping homeless people as well.

This morning I've been in a local primary school working with very young children and helping them with in a really fun way with interactive games to understand money. So we've been playing quizzes and understanding different currencies and what different money can be used for, and how some people abuse different money as well, but its in a real fun game way, so lots of noise, lots of loud things going on, lots of kids having a lot of fun, so its a terrific way to start my Friday morning. What we hope to get with the children is just for them to be a little bit more savvy with money. Maths is a fantastic subject but it doesn't actually teach you a life skill necessarily. So what we're trying to do with the kids in starting them really young, because they're exposed to money at a really young age now, is to actually understand money and how you can use it sensibly, how you can save it, what interest means, what different currencies mean. So really trying to actually help them with life skills.

Money active is a really exciting three year programme with the Citizens Advice Bureau. We've partnered up with them as experts in the community. And what we're actually doing over the three years is getting out to as many disadvantaged communities as we can to help them better understand money and what they can do usefully with money, and how to avoid getting into debt.

I love so many aspects of my role. Probably working with the children is the most uplifting part of my role, because everyone says they're like sponges, it's so true. And they call me Miss Hallat, which is brilliant. Respect for the first time in my life. What I love most about my job is the variety. So, I get to work with community groups, with schools, with disadvantaged people, with environmentalists. And all of it is really about helping people improve their lives or improve their skills, so its a really uplifting role.

Morgan - IT

My area of the business is responsible for setting IT strategy, which involves getting clarity about where we're going with our IT, where we're going to be investing our money and what are the things that we need to be doing in the coming years.

I love mostly the variety. The sort of things I can get involved with on a day-to-day basis vary. I could be speaking to heads of department explaining what we're going to be doing on the IT side, I could be working with some of the technicians to define where the technology is going for a particular project.

Emma - Finance

My name's Emma, I'm a Lead Technician working in Financial Management. Within Financial Management we support the business areas. I look after the savings product and marketing division. What I love most about working in Financial Management is that you can move around fairly often and you get to learn lots of different things, and there are lots of prospects within the department. Yesterday I was working on stress testing for savings, so it's looking at the margin that we make within the products. The most challenging parts of my job is working with the business areas. At the moment we're working on plan and forecast which is quite challenging with the marketing department.