Leeds Building Society × Verve: AI-Powered Communications Testing at Scale

Winner of ESOMAR's Tony Cowling Innovation Award 2026.

Leeds Building Society (LBS) faced a critical challenge: customers in mortgage arrears often navigate overlapping financial, health, and cognitive pressures that shape how they read and respond to communications. Under Consumer Duty regulation, LBS needed to evidence that every communication met vulnerable customers' needs - but traditional qualitative research allowed testing of only around 15-20 communications a year.  

To close this gap, LBS partnered with Verve to build Verve Intelligent Personas & Simulations (VIPS). One a Comms Testing Expert, which evaluates drafts for cognitive load, clarity, compliance, and emotional impact, and the other a Knowledge Expert, a synthesised intelligence layer grounded in FCA vulnerability frameworks, depth interviews, expert input, and LBS's own proprietary data. Validated through a champion-challenger framework alongside real qualitative research, the tools moved from pilot into embedded workflows. 

The results were substantial. LBS significantly scaled testing within just two months, without sacrificing rigour or empathy - every customer communication can now be reviewed before release. Beyond speed, the quality of outputs improved: comms were rewritten more clearly across audiences and channels, giving LBS strong, side-by-side evidence for regulators. The approach has since expanded beyond vulnerable-customer communications to LBS's wider customer base, with plans to extend to further conditions like dyslexia and dyscalculia and new channels including an upcoming app.