NatWest Group teams up with AWS to harness the power of generative AI

Developing responsible AI products to support goal of helping customers enhance their financial wellbeing.

  • Monday, 18th September 2023 Posted 1 year ago in by Phil Alsop

NatWest Group is expanding its collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) – including AWS’s generative AI solutions — to more rapidly drive toward its goal of helping 10 million people manage their financial wellbeing per year by the end of 2027.

 

The move recognises that harnessing the power of responsible and ethical AI use will be essential to achieving the bank’s commitment to help customers manage their financial wellbeing by providing personalised support — whether that’s for buying a home, saving for the future, learning critical money management skills or setting up and growing a business. It is doing this using personalised engagement tools, such as the NatWest Digital Financial Health Check, and the recently extended Know Your Credit Score service — available to anyone in the UK.

 

Data scientists and engineers from NatWest Group will work closely with specialist teams from the newly launched $100 million AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to co-create responsible AI products on top of foundation models (FMs) available through Amazon Bedrock.

 

Scott Marcar, NatWest Group, Group Chief Information Officer said:

 

“This is an exciting chapter in our journey to deliver sustainable growth through deep, lasting relationships with each of the 19 million customers we serve.

 

We’ve chosen to build on our existing strategic relationship with AWS and develop AI-powered financial products with a trusted collaborator who understands how we work with data at scale to keep our customers safe and secure.”

 

The move recognises the strength of our vision, our people, and our data capability. Ultimately, it will allow us to better support and protect our customers across the bank by leveraging the reliability, security and scalability of generative AI.”

 

“This is the latest evolution of our long-standing collaboration with NatWest Group to make it easier and faster to generate data-driven insights and deploy tailored financial solutions at scale,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. “Using Amazon SageMaker, NatWest Group is already creating secure, personalized customer journeys with machine learning. Leveraging new generative AI capabilities like Amazon Bedrock will further enable the bank to deliver the personalised support that customers want and need to meet all their financial goals.”

 

Working with AWS, NatWest Group developed AI models that help the bank detect if customers might be in the process of being scammed. By analysing customers’ behaviours with AI, the bank can spot unusual payments patterns earlier, enabling them to intervene more quickly and reduce financial loss.

 

Combining AWS’s leading data, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI capabilities with the bank’s 300 years of financial services experience will result in tailored banking experiences that deliver personalised communications, financial education, products, and services to NatWest Group’s customers.