Supporting Scottish Friendly through digital transformation

Scottish Friendly (SFA) is one of the UK’s leading mutual financial services organisations, offering ISAs, Junior ISAs, pensions, life insurance, and investment products to a growing customer base. Their entire business runs on Sonata, a core wealth management platform provided by Bravura, supporting every function from finance and actuarial services through to marketing, compliance, and customer service.

With significant growth, increasing regulatory requirements, and ambitious change programmes, SFA needed a partner to strengthen their technology foundations and ensure business-critical programmes could land successfully.

At the start of our engagement, SFA faced three major challenges:

1. Sonata upgrade: moving from v7.12 to v12 after five years without an update, while continuing to onboard new client business.

2. Testing maturity: a test function staffed largely by ex-customer service staff, working with Excel-based test cases and little exposure to industry standards.

3. Multiple transformation programmes: from fund rationalisation (ULFR) to Consumer Duty compliance, SFA needed to modernise ways of working, reduce risk, and increase delivery confidence across the portfolio.

The scale of these changes meant that getting quality and assurance right was not just an IT goal, but a business-critical enabler for the future.

Answer Digital embedded deeply within SFA’s teams, providing QA leadership, development expertise, and delivery assurance across a series of high-value programmes.

Key interventions included:

• Sonata upgrade
  • Designed and implemented a multi-layered test strategy, underpinned by a “Sonata Testing Pyramid”.
  • Introduced automation using Bruno to test APIs between Sonata and the customer portal (MyPlans).
    Ran performance tests on critical customer journeys (e.g. ISA sign-up).
  • Managed environments, dress rehearsals, and third-party assurance (Altus), ensuring stakeholder confidence and regulatory compliance.
• Fund rationalisation (ULFR)
  • Supported a major initiative to consolidate over 300 funds into a smaller, simpler set, already transferring over £1.5 billion of customer assets without disruption.
  • Designed processes for bulk switches, reconciliation, and ongoing support across wealth and life policies.
• Consumer Duty compliance
  • Updated customer correspondence and fixed data issues to align with FCA requirements, ensuring communications deliver clear, fair outcomes.
• Raising QA maturity
  • Migrated test management from spreadsheets to Zephyr, improving reporting, reusability, and real-time visibility.
    Delivered workshops, mentoring, and one-to-one coaching — including preparing testers for ISTQB certification.
    Introduced structured practices such as entry/exit gates, solution design forums, and better test case design.
• Development and tooling support
  • Introduced better source control and traceability with Git, improving auditability and opening the door to CI/CD.
  • Acted as dev/test leads within projects, providing hands-on delivery alongside coaching SFA teams.

Answer Digital’s work helped SFA achieve several critical outcomes:

• Successful upgrade to Sonata v12 with minimal disruption, providing stability, security, and a platform for innovation.
• Major asset transfers completed with over £1.5bn already moved through ULFR with further tranches planned.
• Improved QA capability from unstructured Excel-based testing to a professionalised function using Zephyr, automation, and structured reporting.
• Cost savings through earlier defect detection. Bugs are now caught earlier in the cycle, avoiding the ~16x higher cost of production fixes and reducing reliance on expensive third-party suppliers.
• More resilient change function as SFA’s teams are now equipped with frameworks, tools, and practices to manage complex programmes more effectively.
• Incremental culture shift, although SFA are not yet fully Agile, our embedded coaching has raised awareness of best practices and moved them towards a more structured, change-ready organisation.

For financial services organisations like Scottish Friendly, transformation is complex: core platforms, heavy regulation, and the need for absolute customer trust leave little room for error.

Answer Digital acted not just as extra capacity, but as a critical friend, embedding expertise where needed, delivering outcomes, and raising internal capability along the way.

Today, SFA are better equipped to deliver change programmes with confidence, a mutual society with the stability and structures in place to continue growing and serving its members.