How NatWest Uses AI in Banking Operations and Business Functions

NatWest Group has significantly expanded its deployment of artificial intelligence across multiple operational domains, including customer service enhancement, wealth management documentation, and software engineering processes. According to a blog post published by Chief Information Officer Scott Marcar, 2025 marked the inaugural year of large-scale AI system implementation throughout the organization. The primary objectives focus on elevating productivity metrics and strengthening customer engagement capabilities.

🤖 Generative AI Transforming Customer Service Operations

Within customer service operations, generative AI technology has been integrated into Cora, the bank's digital assistant platform. The number of customer journey scenarios supported by generative AI capabilities expanded from four to 21 pathways. The financial institution reports this advancement has resulted in accelerated resolution timeframes and diminished requirements for human agent intervention.

In early 2025, approximately 25,000 customers will gain access to an innovative agentic financial assistant embedded within Cora, constructed on OpenAI foundational models. This enhanced version enables customers to pose questions using natural language regarding recent transactions and expenditure patterns directly through the banking application.

The subsequent development phase incorporates voice-to-voice functionality that recognizes tone and conversational subtleties. Customers will possess the capability to report suspected fraudulent activity and manage associated cases through the conversational interface.

The influence of AI on internal customer service workflows has been particularly pronounced in time efficiency improvements. Within the retail banking division, automated call summarization and complaint drafting utilities have recovered more than 70,000 hours of employee time. These AI-generated summaries of customer interactions facilitate the composition of written responses to customer complaints.

👥 Enterprise-Wide Staff Access to Copilot Technology

Marcar confirms that all approximately 60,000 employees have been granted access to AI-powered tools, including Microsoft Copilot Chat and the bank's proprietary large language model. More than half of the workforce has completed advanced training beyond the fundamental instruction programs offered.

💼 Wealth Management Document Summarization

In NatWest's private banking and wealth management operations, AI technology enhances document management and client record maintenance. Relationship managers utilize notes, meeting summaries, and correspondence to comprehend clients' financial circumstances. The AI systems generate comprehensive summaries of meetings and documents, reducing information review and recording time by 30%, thereby releasing additional time for direct client interactions. Financial advisers can allocate more hours to advisory services rather than administrative tasks.

☁️ AWS Cloud Infrastructure Foundation

These transformative changes depend upon substantial alterations NatWest has implemented to its data infrastructure. The organization has restructured its data architecture to establish unified customer perspectives and migrated workloads to Amazon Web Services while streamlining legacy systems. Enhanced data accessibility and scalable computing capacity support the summarization tools and conversational systems deployed in customer service operations.

💻 Software Development Acceleration

Software development represents the third major area of AI deployment. The bank's 12,000 engineering professionals utilize AI coding tools, and Marcar reports that AI now generates over one-third of the company's codebase, including drafting, reviewing, and testing software components. Throughout 2025, NatWest recruited nearly 1,000 graduate software engineers across India and the United Kingdom.

Pilot programs implementing agentic engineering within financial crime units produced a tenfold productivity increase, prompting NatWest to extend agentic engineering methodologies more broadly. The stated objective involves building and iterating systems with greater velocity.

🔒 Fraud Prevention and Risk Monitoring

The financial institution has invested substantially in AI-powered analytics for fraud detection and risk monitoring, engineered to identify anomalous activity patterns and notify customers when potential risks are detected.

Concurrent with operational deployment, NatWest has established an AI research office concentrating on technologies including audiovisual conversational systems and proprietary small language models. The organization has formalized governance frameworks through an AI and Data Ethics Code of Conduct and participates in the Financial Conduct Authority's Live AI Testing programme.

📊 Key Conclusions

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