TL;DR
NatWest invested £1.2 billion in its technology, data, and AI transformation in 2025, delivering 70,000 hours of staff time savings and freeing up £100 million in investment capacity. CIO Scott Marcar says 2026 will bring customer-facing breakthroughs including an agentic financial assistant and voice AI capabilities.
Scale of deployment
NatWest has given all 60,000-plus employees access to AI tools including Microsoft Copilot Chat and an internal large language model. More than half of staff have completed additional training beyond the basics.
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 summarisation 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.
The combined effect of AI, cloud migration, and business simplification contributed to £100 million in investment capacity during 2025.
Customer-facing AI coming in 2026
Marcar says 2026 will shift the focus from internal deployment to customer experience. By the end of Q1, 25,000 customers will have access to a new agentic financial assistant within Cora, NatWest’s digital chatbot. Built on OpenAI models, it will let customers ask natural language questions about their spending directly in the app.
Later in the year, NatWest plans to experiment with voice-to-voice capability. A new fraud support feature, also powered by agentic AI within Cora, will let 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 Marcar.
Looking forward
NatWest’s deployment offers a concrete benchmark for other UK financial services firms weighing AI investment. The reported metrics — 70,000 hours saved, 35% of code AI-generated, 30% more client time in wealth management — provide measurable data points for organisations building their own business cases.