How NatWest Group uses AI

NatWest is testing an agentic AI system that investigates customer complaints across several data sources and presents a summarised view to a complaint handler, who approves it, with the aim of speeding up handling and resolution. The trial runs in the FCA's AI Live Testing environment, with performance tracked daily on task accuracy, coherence and hallucination, and every AI generated summary subject to human oversight. The bank plans to use production like environments before any move to live use. It is a pilot; no outcome figures are disclosed.

NatWest Group says it became the first UK bank to offer an app inside ChatGPT, standing alongside Rightmove and MoneySuperMarket in the ChatGPT app store. The app draws on NatWest's own public APIs so a ChatGPT user can calculate how much they could borrow, test affordability and deposit scenarios, and get a tailored mortgage rate, with conversations in the app clearly branded as NatWest. From there the conversation hands off to NatWest's own channels for specialist advice, an appointment or a digital mortgage application. Neither NatWest nor the trade press coverage discloses usage numbers or outcomes.

NatWest routes a wide range of everyday customer queries through Cora, its AI assistant in online banking and the mobile app, now with generative AI (Cora+). Customers whose ATM withdrawal did not pay out are sent to Cora with the phrase "ATM dispute" as the first step of the claim, and the assistant is available before login as well.

NatWest disclosed that Cora handled 10.8 million queries over 2023, more than double the roughly five million it handled in 2019, and that the top five questions asked via Cora are about cancelling a transaction, changing an address, asking for a bank statement, requesting a new bank card or opening an ISA.

NatWest says the generative AI version improved customer satisfaction and reduced how often a colleague has to step in, and in 2025 it began a collaboration with OpenAI to extend the assistant to more complex tasks.

NatWest began working with Featurespace in 2019, when its incumbent fraud detection system was struggling to identify fraud and scams, and moved to Featurespace's real time platform with adaptive machine learning models as the first line of defence, deployed enterprise wide. Building on its results in authorised push payment scam detection, the bank extended the platform to real time debit card fraud detection with deep behavioural models and ensembled risk scores, integrated with SMS alerts that let customers approve or decline transactions. The vendor reports, citing NatWest data from 2025, a higher value of fraud and scams detected and fewer false positives on scams.