How NatWest Is Scaling Customer Engagement with AI

After years of disciplined investments to make digital experiences faster, simpler, and more intuitive for customers, NatWest Group had every right to rest on its laurels. Strong improvements in customer experience and market-leading financial performance had put the wind back in its sails. But its journey toward becoming the UK’s leading bank had only just begun.

NatWest has a simple ambition: to succeed with customers. Central to this strategy is the promotion of a culture of disciplined growth, driven by deepening engagement with core customers and maximizing inorganic opportunities, such as successfully integrating customers from the recently acquired Metro Bank and Sainsbury’s Bank.

NatWest long understood that, even in a digital world, customer engagement needed to feel personal and human. The bank had invested in a robust digital foundation that provided a 360-degree view of the customer, powered by machine learning and generative AI. NatWest also had evidence of the value (doubling Customer Lifetime Value and tripling its Net Promoter Score^SM ) of using that intelligence to engage customers. But scaling to all 18 million customers? That was hard, though not for the reasons one would imagine.

In most situations, good ideas and insights are rare. We think about them as the critical input or the magic behind the curtain, but not in this instance. In fact, if you talked to colleagues in the bank—from the frontline staff who serve customers day-to-day to the teams who manage longer-term initiatives to improve the customer experience—there was no shortage of good ideas, smart strategies, and sharp insights. But too often, those ideas, strategies, and insights got lost in a hyper-dimensional web of data platforms, technologies, and handoff-laden business processes. The complexity was hard to fathom: hundreds of different datasets, each requiring specialist expertise to decipher, manual keying and rekeying, form-filling, and on and on.

It simply took too long to go from idea to value, leaving colleagues frustrated and customers overwhelmed. It typically required 60 to 100 days to take a simple customer insight and launch a campaign into the market, 40 FTEs to create that campaign, and more than 10 handoffs across different teams. Yet 80% of those campaigns were deemed by customers to be “not relevant” to them.

Although the temptation to optimize that 60-100 day process was clear—e.g., take a long list of initiatives and work through them—the bank had other ideas. Instead of going from 60 days down to 55, 50, 45, etc., its leadership team asked a simple question: What if we could do all of that in 1 day? In other words, rather than rewrite the playbook, what if we just rip it up? 

The bank’s leadership knew this wouldn’t be easy, so it took bold action to create a new business area focused on transforming customer engagement, with customer needs at the core. The new business area has a small number of teams dedicated to “customer missions,” improving engagement at key moments in the customer life cycle to ensure their needs are being fully met. Rather than use campaigns to push sales messages at specific points in time, these teams use intelligent “triggers” to engage customers in a contextual and helpful way.

For example, the bank sees that a customer has been withdrawing cash from an ATM that charges a fee and sends them a notification highlighting nearby ATMs that don’t. As the bank’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Zachery Anderson puts it, “If you start to see customers in a more complete way and focus on helping them across their life cycle, you unlock a tremendous amount of value.”

The bank knew that it would take more than just a new way of working to make its “1 Day” ambition a reality. It gave the challenge to its data products and digital channels teams, who had years of experience building enterprise-scale AI tools and an award-winning mobile app. No one was sure how long it would take, although most executives, if you polled them, probably would have guessed two to three years.

The answer? Four months.

The bank’s strong tech foundation combined with breakthrough agentic AI technology—which enables models to conduct complex reasoning and problem-solving on the fly—meant that a huge volume of manual work could be automated, freeing up the customer mission teams to focus on what really matters: generating high-impact and data-driven ideas. They can now do that using a purpose-built AI tool that allows them to understand customer insights, model different engagement strategies, immediately transform the best ideas into tests, and then continually measure and optimize the impact based on what’s working and what’s not.

As for the once-onerous idea-to-value process? Here’s how the new, AI-enabled process compares:

• 60-100 days is now 1 day
• 40 FTEs involved and 10 handoffs are now 4-5 FTEs and 0 handoffs

The bank still has some work to do to scale these tools and processes, but the path ahead is clear. NatWest’s Head of Customer Engagement Katie Ayaz sums it up well: “We’re here to deliver value for our customers in the moments that matter most. To do that, we need to be able to understand their needs holistically and then translate that understanding into action. With the AI tools that exist today, we now have that capability. I’m incredibly proud of the value we’ve delivered thus far, but this is only the beginning.”