Corstorphine Building Society / BB-Demo – Demo
Callcompleted
Corstorphine Building Society · 2026-03-31 13:30
On the 31 Mar 2026 demo, Morag Cowie and Elspeth Haldane saw clear value in the broker and member views. Struan Mackay then said the society has no Snowflake account, which the brain needs and which adds a second supplier risk review.
What was said
What this says
Current to 13 Oct 26On the 31 Mar 2026 demo, Morag Cowie and Elspeth Haldane saw clear value in the broker and member views. Struan Mackay then said the society has no Snowflake account, which the brain needs and which adds a second supplier risk review.
What happened: Hannah Lowe demoed broker firm pages, plain-English questions and the dashboards builder on a sample extract. Struan Mackay then said the society has no Snowflake account.
Customer view: Morag said the dashboard is the board paper she spends half a day each quarter pulling together by hand. Elspeth wants to see the member-query grouping on real data before she believes it.
Commercial: Tom Ashdown said the figure pencilled is £155k, total value with implementation included, not a yearly number. Morag said it is in the area she expected but wants it in writing.
Watch: Struan will take the Snowflake point to his own people and cannot promise a quick answer. The account is a supplier in its own right, so a second risk assessment follows.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Theme
Demo and Snowflake blocker
Importance
neutral
Sentiment
mixed
Voice
champion
Who was there
BB-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Hannah Lowe to send Struan Mackay a plain-terms note on what the brain needs from a Snowflake account.
- Tom Ashdown to send a written proposal stating scope, cost split and the Snowflake position.
- Morag Cowie and Elspeth Haldane to supply the questions their teams would ask first.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- The society has no Snowflake account and the brain cannot be built without one.
- A separate supplier risk review for Snowflake sits alongside BB-Demo's, so the timeline is unclear.
- Struan Mackay cannot promise a quick answer on appetite for a Snowflake account.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- Morag Cowie sees the dashboards builder as the answer to her quarterly board paper.
- Elspeth Haldane's member services team could share the brain with intermediary distribution.
Transcript
Tom Ashdown NoneHello, hello. Can everyone hear me alright?
Morag Cowie NoneAye, loud and clear. Afternoon, Tom.
Hannah Lowe NoneAfternoon, all. Audio's fine my end.- Tom Ashdown NoneBrilliant. How's your week been, Morag? Anything exciting, or is it the usual?
- Morag Cowie NoneWell, the broker story of the week is that one of our bigger firms went quiet on submissions for about a fortnight, and nobody on my team could tell me why until one of the business development managers happened to phone them. Turned out they'd changed who handled their mortgage cases and nobody told us. So, you can see why I'm keen to see this.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAh, that's exactly the sort of thing. No drama, that's a classic. Struan, Elspeth, good to see you both. Struan, is it all right if I say your name right? I always second guess myself.
Struan Mackay NoneStruan, yes, you've got it. Thanks for having us. I'll be honest, I'm mostly here to listen and ask the awkward technical questions.
Elspeth Haldane NoneAnd I'm here because Morag told me member services might get something out of it. I'm not sure yet how, so I'll be watching with an open mind.- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's a fair place to start. Before I share anything, can I ask what you most need to know by the end of the call? Then I'll steer the demo towards that rather than just clicking through everything.
- Morag Cowie NoneLet's not overcomplicate it. I want to see one broker firm, the whole picture. What they've sent us, who here has spoken to them, whether anything's gone wrong for their clients. And then I want to ask it which brokers are slipping.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneFor me it's whether I can see when a member's complaint or query traces back to a broker firm. At the moment I find that out by accident.
- Struan Mackay NoneAnd mine is where it runs, who can see what, and how it gets at our data. I've got a list, but we can come to it.
- Hannah Lowe NoneGood. I'll put the list of questions in writing afterwards so nothing gets lost. Right, let me share my screen. Can you see that all right?
- Morag Cowie NoneYes, I can see a page with a broker firm's name at the top.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's it. To be precise about what you're looking at: this is the sample extract of broker firm records you sent over, loaded into a demo environment. It's not your live data, and it's a small slice, so please don't judge the depth of it. What I want you to see is the shape.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThis is a firm page. Everything the brain knows about this one broker firm is pulled together here. Submissions from your sample file, the contacts, the notes your business development managers have recorded, and the calls and emails that mention the firm.
- Morag Cowie NoneSo that's the thing my BDMs keep in their heads. Or in four different places.
- Tom Ashdown NoneMm, that's what we hear a lot.
- Hannah Lowe NoneRight. And down this side you've got a timeline. Here, the submissions drop away across several weeks, and just above it a note from a business development manager saying a contact has moved on. Nobody had to join those two up by hand. Now let me ask it directly.
- Hannah Lowe NoneI'll type: which broker firms have submitted noticeably less over the last couple of months than before? And let that run.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneHow long does that normally take?
- Hannah Lowe NoneA few seconds on this sample. On bigger data it depends on the question, but this sort of thing is quick. There we are.
- Hannah Lowe NoneSo it's given me a short list of firms, and for each one it says why it flagged them and where the evidence is. This one, you can click through and it takes you to the actual records, not just a summary. The short answer is it tells you who's slipping. The longer answer is it only tells you what's in the sources connected, so if a firm submits through a channel that isn't connected, it won't see that.
- Morag Cowie NoneAye, that's fair. I'd rather it told me what it doesn't know.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAnd that's deliberate. We'd rather it says so than guesses.
- Morag Cowie NoneCan you open the second one? The one that's marked as slipping but I'd have said was fine.
- Hannah Lowe NoneSure. So this one. It's flagged because the volume of submissions is lower than their own earlier pattern, but you can see it's seasonal in the sample, so this is where your judgement comes in. It points you at the firm, it doesn't make the decision for you.
- Morag Cowie NoneRight, good. That's more or less how I'd use it. My managers know their brokers, they just can't see everything at once.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneCan I ask about the member side? If I search for a firm's name, does it show me member contacts as well?
- Hannah Lowe NoneIt can, if the member services records are one of the connected sources. In this sample I've only got a handful of member queries that mention a firm, so let me search and show you.
- Hannah Lowe NoneSearching on the firm name. Here, the results are grouped by where they came from. Broker notes, then emails, then these two member queries. Both mention the same firm in connection with a delay on an application.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneOh, that's useful. That's exactly the thing. Those two would have gone to different people on my team and nobody would have put them together.
- Morag Cowie NoneAnd I'd not have known at all. Our members come first, and if a broker's causing delays for them, I want to hear about it before the member rings the chief executive.
- Tom Ashdown NoneWhich is the other half of what the brain does. It's the same layer for both of your teams, so you're not each keeping your own version.
- Struan Mackay NoneCan I come in there? Because that's the bit I'd worry about. Two teams, one layer. Who sees what? Member data is a different category from broker data and I'll have the data protection people asking.
- Hannah Lowe NoneIt's a good question and I'll answer it properly rather than quickly. Access follows the permissions you set. You can restrict what each team sees, down to the source. The short answer is that Elspeth's team need not see broker commercial notes, and Morag's team need not see member records, unless you decide otherwise. I'll put the detail in writing so your data protection people have it in a document rather than from my memory on a call.
- Struan Mackay NoneThat'd be helpful. Thank you.
- Hannah Lowe NoneLet me show you a couple more things first, and then we'll get into architecture, because I think that's where your list lives. Dashboards. This is the builder.
- Hannah Lowe NoneI'll build a simple one live. Submissions by firm, last few months, with the ones that have dropped highlighted. And I can add a second tile with member queries that mention each firm. Pick, drag, done.
- Morag Cowie NoneThat's the board paper right there, if I'm honest. I spend half a day every quarter pulling that together by hand.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat's what I was hoping you'd say, Morag. Leave that with me, I'll make sure the proposal speaks to it.
- Morag Cowie NoneMind, I'd not want to promise the board anything before we've been through supplier risk. Our process is our process.
- Tom Ashdown NoneOf course. No drama, we'd expect that. Hannah's done a fair few of those reviews, so it's well trodden.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneCould I ask one more thing about what I just saw? If the question's about a member rather than a firm, is it the same?
- Hannah Lowe NoneSame mechanism. Ask about a member and it works through whichever connected sources hold that member. Again, how much it finds depends on what's connected, and what you've allowed it to see. I'll show you one here.
- Hannah Lowe NoneI'll ask: show me every query from members this quarter that mentions a mortgage application delay, grouped by broker firm. And there you go. Three firms, and one of them accounts for most. In this sample, anyway.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneMm. Right. I'd have to see that on real data before I believed it. But I take the point.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's the right instinct, and it's the right order. Which actually brings me to Struan's list. Struan, shall I take it now? We're a good way through and I'd rather not leave your questions to the last minute.
- Struan Mackay NonePlease. So, first of all, where does it actually run? Where does our data go?
- Hannah Lowe NoneIt doesn't go anywhere. That's the design. BB-Demo is built and run inside your own Snowflake account. Your data stays in your account, the brain sits on top of it there, and we work inside it with the access you give us. We don't copy it out to a platform of ours.
- Struan Mackay NoneRight. Right, so that's where I have to stop you, because we don't have a Snowflake account. Not today. We have our own reporting warehouse and some extracts, and I know that's not the same thing.
- Morag Cowie NoneOh. Struan, I didn't know that. I thought you'd have been using it already.
- Struan Mackay NoneNo, it's not something we've gone for. I don't want to be the person who deflates the call, but it'd be unfair to let you carry on as if it's a switch we flip.
- Tom Ashdown NoneNo, you're not deflating anything, that's the right thing to say, and the sooner the better. Hannah?
- Hannah Lowe NoneThank you, Struan, genuinely. That's useful to know now and not in six weeks. So, to be precise: yes, you'd need a Snowflake account first. The brain is built inside it, so there's no version of this that skips that step. What you saw today ran in our demo environment on a sample, purely so you could see the product.
- Struan Mackay NoneUnderstood. Then my real question is what that means for us. Who sets the account up, what does it involve, and how long before we could even start on the connectors?
- Hannah Lowe NoneSetting up the account is something you'd do with the vendor directly, and it would sit with your team and whoever owns your platform decisions. What we'd do is tell you exactly what we need from it: how it should be structured, which roles and permissions, what the connectors would need to reach. I'd rather not guess a timescale for the account itself, because that depends on your procurement and your security approval, not on us.
- Struan Mackay NoneThat's fair. And it's a supplier in its own right, so it'd go through the same risk process as you.
- Morag Cowie NoneWhich means two assessments instead of one. Aye. That's the bit I'd want to be honest with the board about.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAnd you should be. I'd rather you went in with the full picture than had it surprise you later. It's not a showstopper, it's a sequencing thing. The account comes first, then the implementation.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneCan I ask a naive question? Is it a big thing, a Snowflake account? I'm not technical. Is it like a big IT project?
- Struan Mackay NoneIt's not huge to open one. The work's in doing it properly, networks, roles, how it's governed, who's allowed to put what in it. For a regulated society that's where the time goes.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's exactly right, and I'd add that for a regulated organisation we'd support the security review as part of the Enterprise implementation. We have a standard set of answers and I'd tailor them. I'd be wary of promising anything beyond what I can check, and if there's a question I'm unsure of I'll take it to our security lead rather than answer from memory.
- Struan Mackay NoneGood. I'd rather that than a confident wrong answer.
- Morag Cowie NoneRight. So where does that leave us? Because I don't want us all to leave this call having liked the demo and then nothing happens.
- Tom Ashdown NoneFair challenge. Can I suggest it leaves us with a short list? One, Hannah sends Struan a written note on what the brain needs from a Snowflake account, in plain terms, so he can take it to whoever decides. Two, Hannah also sends the access and permissions detail for the data protection folk. Three, I pull together the proposal so you've got scope and cost on paper, with the Snowflake position stated clearly in it.
- Morag Cowie NoneAnd the cost. I'd want to know what we're looking at before I talk to anyone.
- Tom Ashdown NoneRight, so, not from memory, I'll confirm it properly in writing. But the figure we've pencilled for the whole deal is £155,000, and that's the total value, implementation included, not a yearly number. I'll set out the split so it isn't confusing. Does that sound about the size you'd expected?
- Morag Cowie NoneIt's in the area I'd had in my head. I'd not want to say more until I've seen it written down.
- Struan Mackay NoneAnd does that include anything for the Snowflake side? I'm assuming not, since that's with them.
- Tom Ashdown NoneI'll be clear on that in the proposal so there's no ambiguity. The way I understand it, the account is between you and them, and what we'd quote is ours. But I'll check and put it in writing.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneCan I ask what you'd want from my side? If this goes ahead, I mean. I don't want to sit back and let Morag's team own it.
- Hannah Lowe NoneHonestly, the most useful thing is a short list of the member queries that really matter to you. Which questions you'd want to ask about brokers if you could. That shapes which sources we connect first, so it would really help the design.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneI can do that. I'll get my team leaders to jot down what they'd ask. They'll have plenty, I'm sure.
- Morag Cowie NoneAnd I'll do the same for my business development managers. Let's not overcomplicate it, just the ten questions they'd ask first on a Monday morning.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat would be perfect. Right, so, Hannah's note, Hannah's access detail, the proposal from me, and your question lists from Morag and Elspeth. Struan, anything from you before we let everyone go?
- Struan Mackay NoneOnly that I'll take the Snowflake point to our own people and see what the appetite is. I can't promise an answer quickly, and I'd rather say that now. But I'll tell you straight when I know.
- Morag Cowie NoneThat's all I'd ask. And I'll not promise the board a date I can't keep, so we'll take it a step at a time.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSounds sensible to me. Let's get something in the diary for a catch-up after everyone's had a chance to read what we send. I'll find a slot and send an invite round next week.
- Hannah Lowe NoneAnd if anything in my note raises more questions, send them straight to me. I'd rather answer one extra question now than have it sit.
- Elspeth Haldane NoneThanks, both. That was more interesting than I'd expected.
- Morag Cowie NoneThanks all. Kind regards, speak soon.
- Tom Ashdown NoneCheers, everyone. Have a good afternoon.
Callsmade from