Why Nationwide’s £7m boss was worth splashing the cash for
Nationwide splashed the cash on it’s top boss, Debbie Crosbie, in this week’s column Samuel Norman asks if they got their monies worth.
Nationwide has been proclaimed Britain’s best bank.
The UK’s largest building society – which is, in fact, not a bank due its status as a mutual – has been handed the crown of Britain’s top banking services provider.
Of course, the report from Forbes and research firm Statista is not undisputed, no matter how much chief executive Debbie Crosbie and her team would like to believe. Though, the accolade does open up a can of worms on whether other metrics hold up.
In many cases, they do. It is hard to dispute the current account switching figures, which consistently show Nationwide head and shoulders above its high street peers.
Much of this is fueled by the £200 sweeteners offered to switchers – effective, certainly, though hardly unique in a market where Santander, Lloyds and a handful of other banks offer similar bribes. Beyond the cash incentives, the mutual consistently dominates the top tier of customer satisfaction rankings.
Even on the corporate pitch, Nationwide is firing goals into the back of the net. The firm bagged £2.3bn from its landmark takeover of Virgin Money.
The mutual would then go on to dish out a £50 payment to over 12m members in what it dubbed ‘The Big Nationwide Thankyou’ following the takeover.
These successes and the latest victory prompt the question: has Debbie Crosbie been vindicated? But one may answer that with another question: what exactly does she need vindicating from?
Top pay for Nationwide chief
Crosbie is no stranger to the high-stakes cleanup. She rose to prominence as the fixer who dragged TSB out of the wreckage of its 2018 IT meltdown, delivering a three-year turnaround strategy a year early.
Before that, she was the first woman to sign a Scottish banknote while steering Clydesdale Bank through its own complex demerger.
But nearly a decade after leaving Cydesdale, the finance chief was slapped with the label of “Britain’s most controversial banker”. Her top offences have been listed as aggressive dealmaking and a bumper pay packet – assets that are usually the basic criteria for any City banking chief.
And that may well be the crux of the issue. Because of its mutual status, many assume that if Nationwide swapped its partnership with the Football Association for a spot on the pitch, it should be playing a volunteer friendly Sunday league game.
But the fact is Nationwide – at around 16m members – is a premier league bank and Debbie Crosbie is a Ballon d’Or banker. To answer whether Debbie Crosbie is to be vindicated is to simply shift the goal posts.
Crosbie’s unprecedented £7m package – a whopping 43 per cent increase on the previous year- was named an “obscenity”. The figure was also more than double the £3.4m former Nationwide chief Joe Garner took home in 2022.
Though it may have been a pragmatic play by the board to keep their star captain from sporting another team’s colours.
Members of the mutual accused it of falling out of line with the building society’s practices. And in many cases, it did. But the scale of the Virgin Money deal, which created the UK’s second-largest retail lender, was cited behind the pay bump.
Nationwide is expected to update on its latest remuneration figures in the next month when its annual report is posted.
In the 2025 financial year for the big four banks Lloyds’ Charlie Nunn pocketed £7.4m and Natwest’s Paul Thwaite’s secured £6.6m. Both fall below the whopping £15m scored by Barclays’ CS Venkatkrishnan.
Nationwide’s takeover of Virgin Money raises eyebrows
But it’s not just her own pay that Crosbie has splashed the cash on. It was the shotgun nature of the historic takeover of Sir Richard Branson’s banking love-child that rattled members the most. First off was Nationwide’s refusal to hold a vote on the matter. The mutual argued that under the Building Societies Act 1986, a vote was only required if the deal is of a certain size relative to the society – the board insisted it wasn’t. Given mutuals use the deposits of their members, this was a particular sting. And members weren’t thrilled to have their reserves used to bail out Australian hedge funds and Richard Branson, who pocketed over £650m from the takeover, as well as subsequent branding fees, without asking for permission.
Nationwide forked out £2.9bn for the deal, which members argued could go towards lower mortgage rates or higher member bond payouts. One of the most crucial criticisms, that encapsulated the undemocratic allegations, was the insistence on paying £15m a year to maintain the Virgin Money name temporarily. Given Virgin Money was a public company at the time, it spiked fears the traditional ethos at Nationwide would be diluted by absorbing a bank used to catering to shareholders. Perhaps the fear was correct.
Under Crosbie’s leadership, Nationwide opened its wallet for a number of splashy, not-very-mutual-like TV ads that featured Hollywood stars, including one with Dominic West that would later be banned for being unclear over its bank branch policy. The idea of a straight-talking building society ad offering sensible financial products has become passé.
We don’t need to ask whether Nationwide’s ethos has changed under the Debbie dynasty. It obviously has. Instead, it appears Crosbie’s success as a ruthless banking chief and her duty as a building society custodian have become two very different things.
Responding to bagging the best UK bank crown, Crosbie claimed the win “reflected the strength of our mutual model”. Ironically, it may actually be a reflection of how effectively she has dismantled it.