NatWest hails progress after £1.2bn spent on tech last year, but true AI transformation to come

AI foundations set

In a blog post, NatWest Group CIO Scott Marcar said this year will see the bank take advantage of the AI “building blocks” deployed last year.

“The only certainty is that how customers bank will look very different in the future,” he said. “That’s why being closer to them, with insight and trust, matters more than ever. As technology reshapes how people live, work and bank, we’ve put in place the building blocks to understand, respond to and serve customers’ fast evolving needs,” wrote Marcar.

“Last year brought AI deployment at scale across NatWest, and as we move into 2026, the transformative benefits are becoming more of a reality for our customers and colleagues – delivering growth, greater productivity, and, most importantly, deepening relationships – so that we can be a trusted partner for tomorrow’s banking,” he added.

From a staff perspective, all staff now have access to AI tools including Microsoft Copilot Chat and the bank’s internal large language model (LLM), with more than half reported to have taken additional training.

According to the bank, more than 70,000 hours were saved through automated AI call summaries in its retail business, while relationship managers in its wealth business were able to spend 30% more time on customer conversations by using AI. According to NatWest, through agentic and voice AI, customers will receive “more intuitive, personalised and seamless interactions” this year.

In the next few months, 25,000 NatWest customers will have access to its agentic financial assistant within Cora, its customer-facing agentic AI assistant. “Underpinned by OpenAI models, customers will be able to ask natural language questions about their recent spending, in their own words, on their app,” said the bank.

The bank will then experiment with voice-to-voice AI capability, which aims to provide “human-like empathy, tone and inflection”.

Wider tech investment

As part of its wider multi-year digital transformation, NatWest has added around 6,000 tech staff since 2021. In 2025 alone, it recruited 1,000 software engineers through its India Hub in Bengaluru. Its chief AI researcher, Maja Pantic, is working with AI in areas such as audiovisual conversational AI, multi-biometrics and proprietary small language models.

Marcar wrote: “We can’t underestimate the scale of the work we have done to date to rebuild our technology foundations to make us faster, safer and more resilient. A scalable, modular tech stack now underpins how we deliver new products and services, how we integrate with partners, and how we provide the protection and operational resilience customers expect.”

He said the bank has been moving away from legacy systems in an “inside-out” transformation. It has also created a single, connected view of each customer. “We can anticipate needs faster, remove friction from everyday banking and make onboarding more seamless,” he wrote on his blog post.

Marcar stressed that the proliferation of AI will support human workers, adding: “It’s a future where the expertise of our colleagues is augmented by the intelligence and ease of modern technology.”