After pouring £1.2 billion into its tech stack last year, NatWest claims it is “quietly transforming…from the inside out” by ditching legacy platforms, rolling out AI at scale, and making better use of its vast data estate – but the bank has bigger plans for 2026.

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

Among the headline figures, AI has saved retail banking teams more than 70,000 hours by automating call summaries and streamlining complaint handling, while summarisation 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’s 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.

In particular, Marcar emphasised the bank’s push to streamline its wealth 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.

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. 

At its heart, this transformation has been powered by an army of software engineers, with around 6,000 tech hires made across the UK and India since 2021, almost 1,000 of which were in the last year alone.

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Looking ahead, Marcar said that 2026 will be the year “truly transformative AI become a reality”, with NatWest working to integrate agentic and voice AI systems for more intuitive and personalised banking.

By the end of Q1, the bank intends for 25,000 customers to have access to its new agentic financial assistant, a natural language LLM underpinned by OpenAI models, with plans to experiment with voice-to-voice capabilities.

Agentic AI will also be used to power next-gen fraud detection and agentic-led engineering, following trials within RBSI and the bank’s Financial Crime division that saw productivity in these areas increase tenfold.  

“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,” said Marcar.