Statement re Nationwide 2026 preliminary results
21 May 2026, London — Following publication of Nationwide’s 2026 Preliminary Results (LSE Regulatory News Service), James Sherwin-Smith, a Member Nominated Candidate for election to Nationwide’s Board of Directors in 2026, commented:
Nationwide’s latest preliminary results confirm that the Society remains financially strong and continues to gain in scale following the Virgin Money acquisition, alongside resilient mortgage growth, deposit growth and a still-supportive interest rate environment.
Some Members may welcome the continuation of the Fairer Share payment that rewards a subset of the ownership base, however the majority of Members are again missing out on this discretionary distribution of the Society’s profits, and may ask why this has not been subject to a Member vote (1).
These results reinforce an important principle: strong performance should strengthen transparency and accountability to Members, and not be used as a reason to reduce scrutiny.
Nationwide’s leadership will understandably highlight growth, customer satisfaction and progress integrating Virgin Money. But Members are still being asked to place very substantial trust in management and the Board while receiving relatively limited transparency about the long-term integration strategy, future costs, technology migration risks and the operational consequences of creating a significantly larger banking group.
Integration costs have risen materially, and the migration of millions of Virgin Money customer accounts onto common systems is yet to begin. Members deserve far greater detail about how success will be measured, what risks remain, and how the acquisition will improve outcomes for ordinary Members over the long term rather than simply increasing institutional scale.
It is also notable that, in light of a further Fairer Share payment, Nationwide’s own reported measure of overall Member benefit has fallen significantly compared with last year (£2.8B in 2024/25 vs £1.8B in 2025/26), while the Society’s pricing advantage versus the wider market has narrowed.
At the same time, executive remuneration is expected to rise under a framework where Member votes remain advisory rather than binding, and where the ‘Quick vote’ (2) system still risks reducing meaningful scrutiny of important governance decisions.
Mutuality should mean more than periodic, discretionary Member distributions and marketing language about ownership. It should also mean meaningful Member influence, transparency and democratic accountability.
As Nationwide becomes an even larger and more systemically important institution following the Virgin Money acquisition, the standards expected of its governance (2, 3) should rise accordingly.
ENDS
Notes to Editors
- See this article – the Society put the donation 1% of profits to charity to a vote of the Members in 2007.
- See Nav Mishra MP’s letter to the Chancellor
- See Nav Mishra MP’s written questions raised in Parliament on:
- Executive Pay (Nationwide’s offers a non-binding vote on remuneration policy)
- Virtual-only AGMs (Nationwide is the only building society to deny members physical access to the AGM)
- Member Nominated Directors (Nationwide hasn’t had a MND on it’s Board since 2002)