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NatWest, the UK’s fourth largest banking group, has signed a five-year deal with Amazon Web Services and Accenture to update key elements of its IT estate.
The deal will see NatWest “accelerating the modernisation of its digital, data and analytics, and AI capabilities”, according to AWS, with the aim of offering “more intuitive, engaging and personalised services” to customers, as well as giving staff access to new AI tools.
Under the partnership with AWS and Accenture, the bank will bring in data tools that will give staff a better overview of the customers they’re interacting with. The deal will also mean new data and analytics tools that can personalise customers’ dealings with the bank, allowing NatWest to offer individualised product recommendations and support services.
The agreement will see the creation of a single data platform and the introduction of AI technologies at the company, leading to greater automation of banking processes and controls, such as digital verification. Operations should be streamlined and costs reduced, according to AWS.
Improvements in data quality under the deal will also support improvements in the bank’s security and anti-fraud measures, as well as its risk and regulatory reporting.
The new deal builds on NatWest and AWS’ previous projects together: in 2024, it also moved its telephony to AWS; the year before, AWS announced that NatWest had been using SageMaker for its machine learning ops platform. The pair also started work on AI for customer-facing services.
Last year, NatWest launched an AI assistant, known as Cora. According to the bank, in 2024 Cora dealt with over 11 million conversations with retail banking customers, half of which it handled without needing to refer to a human agent. Cora was subsequently updated with GenAI capabilities and rebranded as Cora+.
Cora+ answers customers questions in natural language on NatWest’s app as well as its website. In March this year, NatWest signed a deal with OpenAI to expand digital assistant services. AI is also being used by its private banking staff to summarise calls with clients.
Due to its increasing use of artificial intelligence, the bank has set up an ethics team to review its uses of the technology, as well as publishing an AI and data ethics code of conduct.
