Twenty-five thousand NatWest customers will have access to its new agentic financial assistant by the end of the quarter, according to the bank’s group chief information officer.

Scot Marcar said that that the new tool, which is part of its Cora digital assistant and underpinned by OpenAI models, will allow customers to ask natural language questions about their recent spending, in their own words on their app.

NatWest also plans to experiment with voice-to-voice capability later in the year, enabling responses with “human-like empathy, tone and inflection.”

Marcar added that the company is strengthening how it addresses digital threats and scams through AI technology.

“The next generation of fraud support, powered by agentic AI embedded in Cora, will enable customers to report and resolve fraud related cases in real time through natural language conversations,” he said.

Additionally, the bank is rolling out agentic-led engineering across the bank following "highly successful" trials across its offshore bank RBS International (RBSI) and financial crime, which the group CIO said increased productivity tenfold.

“If 2025 was about building and deploying leading AI capabilities, 2026 is the year that the building blocks of truly transformative AI become a reality – with agentic and voice AI enabling more intuitive, more personalised and more seamless interactions,” continued Marcar.

The new developments come after the bank has spent a number of years simplifying and removing complexity across our technology estate.

It has also revamped its data estate to create a single, connected view of each customer, supported by its move to the cloud.

The NatWest executive said that these improvements have led to the bank rolling out new features for customers at a rate four times faster than in 2021, with the organisation launching over 100 new features on its retail app last year alone.

In 2025, NatWest also invested £1.2 billion in its tech, data and AI transformation, whilst also becoming the first UK bank to sign a strategic collaboration with OpenAI.

Since 2021, the organisation has grown its tech and data workforce by around 6,000, with nearly 1,500 of these graduate hires across the UK and India.

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