Craddock will step down at the 2026 AGM on 27 April, having joined the firm in 2018 as chief executive.
During his tenure, the mutual grew its total assets from £612m to over £1bn and it has diversified and broadened its mortgage proposition.
He also oversaw a significant investment programme in the business, which included migrating the IT infrastructure to the cloud, launching digital platforms for mortgage origination and servicing and digital savings, and refurbishing or relocating all the branches.
Craddock also increased the total number of employees from around 140 in 2018 to around 200 in 2025.
He also signed up the business to the Real Living Wage Foundation, the Women in Finance Charter, the Mortgage Industry Mental Health Charter (MIMHC), the Armed Forces Covenant, and more recently, the society has obtained the Gold Autism Acceptance Standard from the North East Autism Society.
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Prior to joining Darlington Building Society, he was chief executive of Buckinghamshire Building Society for around four years, and before that, he spent nearly 10 years at AIB, most recently as UK chief operating officer.
Craddock also spent nearly 20 years at Barclays in various senior roles.
He said: “It has been a privilege to be a steward of the society’s progress over the past seven years, and I’m proud of what we have achieved. It has also been a joy to get to know this fantastic part of the country, and the people who live here.
“In 2026, the society will celebrate its 170th anniversary of encouraging savings and supporting homeownership, and it feels like an appropriate time to hand over the baton to a new chief executive to build on the firm foundations that are in place and take the society to the next station on its journey into the future.”
Rachel Court, Darlington Building Society’s chair, said: “Andrew has been an incredibly successful and transformative CEO of the society for the past seven years, having led the modernisation of our systems, the implementation of our online savings capability, the enhancement of our culture and our offering to members, and perhaps most crucially of all, having contributed massively to the society’s presence in and support of our local communities.
“Andrew really has been a fantastic role model for everything that’s good about the building society sector and will be massively missed when he retires next year.”
