GRAHAM Beale, 56, has been CEO Swindon-based Nationwide Building Society since 2007. He was recently named most people-focused chief executive in a national awards scheme based on staff feedback. Graham lives in Bath and is married to Ros. The couple have two grown-up children.

Next year will see Graham Beale retire after nine years at the helm of Nationwide.

The organisation he heads has about 14m members who effectively own it, as Nationwide is what is known as mutual rather than a bank.

There are about 700 branches and around 17,000 employees, 7,000 of them based in Swindon.

In the Swindon area, 64 percent of Nationwide employees are involved in community activities.

The society has seen profits and lending increase during Graham’s tenure, notably to first time buyers.

There has also been occasional controversy. Only last week the GMB union criticised Nationwide for allowing Carillion staff to work on the Swindon site in spite of the contractor not paying the living wage. Nationwide repeated its pledge that everybody on its site would be paid the living wage nine months ahead of the agreed schedule.

“I come from a very down-to-earth background,” said Graham. “I think that is reflected in my thinking, and I think it resonates very closely with what a mutual stands for, which is to help ordinary people save for the future and to help ordinary people buy their homes.”

Nationwide Customers vote on every aspect of policy including executive pay packages, which had nearly 94 percent approval at the last count. Graham’s runs comfortably into seven figures, although he hardly fits the ‘one percenter’ profile one might expect.

“I was born in Thorne in Yorkshire, which is close to Doncaster. My father was a coalminer and he then moved to British Steel, just as a fairly basic maintenance man, so no privileged background!

“My mother was a nurse. She was a general nurse for a long time and then she became a Marie Curie Nurse, probably for the last ten years of her working time. She was effectively looking after terminally ill patients, but at home rather than in a hospice.”

A younger brother, David, works for Nationwide in London as a risk manager in the commercial lending operations side of the business.

Graham readily acknowledges that other financial sector bosses tend not to have such roots.

“When I look at CEOs at that level they typically will have had a different background to mine, and my own view is that that would draw out a difference of approach.

“I am a fairly basic, down-to-earth individual. I don’t find it difficult talking to anybody in the business, and I actually know what it’s like to be living on a level of income which is closer to the minimum wage than a family that doesn’t really need to give any consideration to income.

“So I understand the pressures and the consequences of living from that sort of background, compared with a more privileged background.

“I think what’s important is you keep your feet on the ground. I think you’ve got to be quite balanced and level at what you do. It would be very easy for me when I’m in this building [the Swindon headquarters] to spend my life on this floor, in this particular closeted area.

“I think it’s important that you’re seen as having all the normal requirements and being one of the team, and when I visit branches and visit departments here or in Northampton, London, Bournemouth, Dunfermline, wherever we’ve got these big concentrations of people, my strong preference is to talk to people, to understand what’s important for them, what’s working, what’s not working, what’s difficult, what’s easy, what are our members saying and what is the competition doing.

“Certain chief executives from the banks, when they visit the branches it’s a bit like a royal visit. Everything will have been polished, people will line up and there’ll be the wedding line handshake. That doesn’t achieve anything other than ticking a box.”

Graham attended a comprehensive school and a sixth form college in Scunthorpe before studying psychology at Leicester University. He met his future wife, Ros, who would become a solicitor, early in his studies.

He wanted to work in marketing, but early attempts to break into the field failed. The young couple were living in Leicester, where Ros had a job.

“I tried for a year to get the job of my dreams and that didn’t happen. As a Plan B I had three offers to train to be an accountant, which was never top of my list, but clearly some people saw in me things that I didn’t.”

Graham trained with what is now KPMG, and a major client was the Leicester Building Society which he audited. In 1985 Graham joined the then Anglia Building Society in Northampton as an auditor. In 1987 the Anglia merged with Nationwide and he’s been on the payroll ever since.

Graham rose through the ranks, including a stint in Scotland leading a firm acquired by Nationwide. He joined Nationwide’s board as finance director in 2003.

There has never been an urge to move away from the building society sector and into, say, banking.

“I feel very strongly that I’ve got to believe in the organisation I work for, that I’ve got to be comfortable with the business ethics and the motivation. I think building societies are very honourable because we are back to looking after the interests of our respective members – savers and borrowers and, increasingly importantly, our current accounts.”

Graham feels his nine year stint at the top before retiring next year is enough for one person.

Future options he’s considering include non-executive roles on the boards of major charities.

He will also devote more time to his main hobbies, which are photography and travel. African wildlife is a favourite subject.

“People say, ‘What do you do for weekend?’ I think they must be imagining I’ve got some exotic lifestyle. I haven’t – I’ve go to the supermarket, I walk the dog, I weed the garden, I do all the sort of stuff you’d expect, but I am fortunate in being able to do some nice travelling.”