NatWest £1.2bn tech revamp puts customer data in play

While the marketing industry frets about its AI driven future, it seems the financial services sector is just getting on with the job after NatWest revealed it is “quietly transforming from the inside out” following a £1.2bn investment in tech, data, and AI transformation.

Detailing the bank’s digital overhaul over the past year in a blog post, NatWest Group tech chief Scott Marcar said that “simplification across the business” had freed £100m in investment capacity over 2025, with AI and continued cloud migration being central to these savings.

AI now writes over a third of NatWest’s code, and saves thousands of hours across frontline teams, with the bank planning a major shift to agentic AI this year.

NatWest claims it making huge savings by ditching legacy platforms, rolling out AI at scale, and making better use of its vast data estate.

In particular, Marcar highlighted the bank’s push to streamline its wealth of customer data to build a “single, connected view of each customer”, a shift he said will cut friction within everyday banking, deliver a smoother onboarding experience, and anticipate the needs of customers.

AI has also saved retail banking teams more than 70,000 hours by automating call summaries and streamlining complaint handling, while the tech is allowing private banking staff to devote 30% more time to customer care.

The bank said the number of customer journeys handled by its GenAI agent, Cora, rose from four to twenty‑one over the year, saving both staff and customers time on routine queries, while all 60,000 of NatWest’s employees have been trained to use AI tools like Copilot in their daily work, adding up to thousands of hours saved.

However, it is the back end where the biggest savings are being made, with NatWest’s more than 12,000 coders using AI to accelerate software development to write around 35% of the bank’s code, saving thousands of man-hours and giving its tech teams the space to focus on higher value work.

The bank also made a strong investment in Bankline, a portal which provides business customers with a single point of access to a range of products, which has helped NatWest in “removing complexity” from fragmented legacy systems, a process it’s keen to continue through partnerships with the likes of OpenAI and AWS to embed more cutting-edge tech across core operations.

The bank has also made around 6,000 tech hires across the UK and India since 2021, nearly 1,000 of which have been appointed in the past year alone.

Marcar concluded: “As we look beyond 2026, we see a future where digital and physical banking experiences blend seamlessly, enabled by a complete customer memory as we accelerate the pace of innovation and show up in the right places.”