NatWest Boxed tech team drives business on embedded finance wave

Household names

The offering is already used by the Automobile Association (AA) for lending and savings; Saga, which offers services such as savings to the over-50s; and three large customers that have not yet been announced, according to Ellis.

When the deal with the AA was announced around a year ago, Ellis said it was a “significant step” in NatWest Boxed’s embedded finance journey. Through these corporate customers, NatWest Bank services are available to potentially millions of consumers.

Embedded finance – which integrates payments, lending, banking and insurance services directly into non-financial digital products – is an increasingly common integration for enterprises.

The rise of BaaS platforms has helped fuel embedded finance in recent years. According to a study from Research and Markets, the global market for BaaS was valued at $29.5bn in 2024, and it is projected to reach $74.8bn by 2030, growing 16.8% a year.

The products that NatWest Boxed has offered to embed so far include unsecured lending and savings, with an expectation to move into point-of-sale lending this year.

Ellis said that while “out of the box is the dream” for the service, large customers require “an element of bespoke”, adding: “We try and do as little of this as possible.”

He said there are small differences for customers in the look of the services and that NatWest Boxed has support teams dedicated to certain customers.

Challenging advantage

While NatWest Boxed’s five BaaS customers are large businesses, Ellis added that the firm is exploring mid-sized customers and is currently working with one small fintech “to see how scalable that could be”.

Building trust with large customers was a major challenge when the business started, said Ellis, adding: “These large companies are not going to trust you with millions of their customers until you can prove you can build a product and it works, that you’re here for the long run, and that you are going treat their customers and the brand that they lend to you well.”

He stated that NatWest’s institutional relationships, built over many years, gave it a “leg up”: “We had an advantage that others might not have – for example, a small fintech, starting from scratch, would probably begin with small customers and build up.”

Ellis said that while building trust was the biggest challenge, data privacy is complicated and skills needed to be hired externally, because cloud-first engineers were required over than the “classic banking engineers”.

The NatWest Boxed team, which is relatively small in comparison to NatWest Bank’s workforce, also lends itself to adopting the latest technologies. This will ultimately benefit its BaaS customers, as well as Mettle. For example, NatWest Boxed is harnessing artificial intelligence (AI), and Ellis believes the organisation – as a separate mid-sized business to the huge NatWest Group – has an advantage when it comes to AI adoption.

“I see us as a mid-sized company, so scalability is a lot easier,” he said. “You can put your arms around the hundreds or so folks who are working on it. This helps because when you turn AI on, or make it available, you want to make sure it’s used consistently and in a wide-ranging way.”

Banking and tech spine

Ellis, who describes himself as one of the last people trained on the Cobol programming language, is no stranger to establishing tech-based businesses, which he has been doing for the past decade.

“I spent most of my life, until about 10 years ago, in classic banking. I had a stretch at the NatWest commercial bank, so I have been in a regulatory, analytical but forward-looking environment,” said Ellis, who started out at Anderson Consulting in the 1990s.

“I have some tech background and in around 2015, when the fintech wave came, I was given the job of driving the innovation for the bank, because I had that tech spine and banking spine I spent five or 10 years building businesses.”

As part of this, he previously headed up NatWest Ventures, where his role was to seed, incubate and scale up digital businesses on behalf of the bank. Mettle was one of these businesses.