NATIONWIDE Building Society says it is creating high quality jobs in the Bournemouth area after revealing record profits and a £500m investment in branches.

The society – which employs 680 permanent staff in the Bournemouth area – says one in three people locally have a savings account with Nationwide.

It saw underlying profits rise by 32 per cent last year to £1.2bn and intends to spend £500m on branches over the next five years

Temporary staff bring the total employed by Nationwide locally to 1,047, most of them based at its Portman House administration centre on Richmond Hill.

Group director Alison Robb said she was “really proud” of the society’s performance.

Bournemouth was one of the first branches to be connected to the Nationwide Now service, which enables customers to speak to mortgage advisers by video link. The innovation has created 200 jobs – 100 of them at Richmond Hill – and Ms Robb said it was proving popular with customers.

“We’re getting absolutely fantastic customer feedback. It’s enabling us to create capacity so if you walk into a branch and the mortgage adviser is busy you can go on to Nationwide Now – but it’s also used to increase the flexibility of our advisers,” she said.

Nationwide has become Britain’s second biggest mortgage lender and Ms Robb said its status as a mutual society had helped.

“I think it’s undoubtedly made a difference. Fundamentally, we’re owned by the people that do business with us very day. Ultimately, that’s the reason we create profit – it’s for them,” she said.

“We’ve got no pressure to create returns for shareholders. That means our board has been able to invest in the last few years. We’ve been able to invest in our infrastructure, our people, our premises, which has really put us in a great position.”

She said customers liked the society and the fact that “absolutely all our customer-facing employees are based in the UK”.

The strength of customer numbers locally is partly a legacy of the locally based Portman Building Society, which merged with Nationwide in 2007.

But Ms Rob added: “What we’ve been able to do is retain those customers over the years and grow those relationships.”

Nationwide said its employees have clocked up more than 3,500 hours’ volunteering time in Bournemouth this financial year and raised £118,000 for charity, including £3,00 for Southampton’s Paediatric Intensive Care Unit.

Last summer, it launched its Side by Side volunteering initiative, which sees it work in partnership with local people and nominated charities. Eighty people took part and Nationwide staff gave 560 hours of volunteering time.