In Retail, NatWest's AI tools have saved more than 70,000 hours through automated call summaries and simplified complaint responses. In Private Banking and Wealth Management, AI summarisation tools have freed up 30% more time for Relationship Managers' customer conversations, and more than 12,000 coders are using AI to accelerate software development, writing around 35% of the bank's code. NatWest invested £1.2bn into its tech, data and AI transformation in 2025.
“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 – with agentic and voice AI enabling more intuitive, more personalised and more seamless interactions,” writes Scott Marcar, NatWest Group's Chief Information Officer.
The bank describes years of work rebuilding its technology foundations, moving away from legacy platforms and transforming its data estate to create a single, connected view of each customer, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Accenture helping to accelerate the effort and the move to the cloud giving real time access and the ability to scale. NatWest calls 2025 the year of deployment at scale.
All of NatWest's ~60,000 colleagues now have access to AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot Chat and the bank's internal LLM tool, and all have had AI training. In the Cora digital assistant, the number of customer journeys powered by GenAI grew from four to twenty one by the end of 2025, enabling more natural conversations, quicker resolution times and less need for colleague intervention. For fraud protection, the bank uses AI driven analytics, machine learning detection and real time monitoring, including real time agentic AI that assesses risk and guides customer behaviour. NatWest was the first UK bank to sign a strategic collaboration with OpenAI, supports its work with an AI and Data Ethics Code of Conduct and Responsible AI training in partnership with Edinburgh University, and takes part in the FCA's Live AI Testing programme.
By the end of the current quarter, 25,000 customers will have access to a new agentic financial assistant within Cora, underpinned by OpenAI models, allowing them to ask natural language questions about their recent spending in their app. Later in the year the bank will experiment with voice-to-voice capability. A next generation of fraud support powered by agentic AI embedded in Cora will enable customers to report and resolve fraud related cases in real time through natural language conversations, and NatWest is rolling out agentic led engineering across the bank following trials in RBSI and Financial Crime that saw productivity increase tenfold.
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