Agentic AI Financial Assistant for 25,000 Retail Banking Customers

NatWest Group has invested 1.2 billion GBP in technology, data, and AI transformation during 2025, delivering 70,000 hours of staff time savings and freeing up 100 million GBP in investment capacity. The bank has given all 60,000+ employees access to AI tools including Microsoft Copilot Chat and an internal large language model, with more than half of staff completing additional training. In the retail division, automated call summaries and complaint drafting tools saved more than 70,000 hours of staff time. In private banking and wealth management, AI summarization tools freed up 30% more time for direct client conversations. The bank's 12,000 software engineers now use AI coding tools, with AI producing over a third of the company's code. For 2026, the focus shifts from internal deployment to customer experience. By the end of Q1 2026, 25,000 customers have access to a new agentic financial assistant within Cora, NatWest's digital chatbot. Built on OpenAI models, the assistant enables customers to ask natural language questions about their spending directly in the app. Later in the year, NatWest plans voice-to-voice capability and a new fraud support feature, also powered by agentic AI within Cora, that lets customers report and resolve fraud cases in real time through conversation. "If 2025 was about building and deploying leading AI capabilities, 2026 is the year that the building blocks of truly transformative AI become a reality," said Scott Marcar, NatWest CIO.