NatWest Group has announced a five-year partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and consultancy firm Accenture to accelerate its data and AI transformation strategy. The collaboration, revealed days ahead of the bank’s half-year earnings report on 25 July, is part of a broader effort to simplify operations and improve personalisation for customers.
The agreement will consolidate data currently dispersed across multiple systems into a unified architecture. According to NatWest Group chief executive Paul Thwaite, this will enhance both service delivery and product availability.
“This alliance with Accenture and AWS is crucial to assisting us in advancing the transformation of NatWest as we evolve into a more straightforward, technology- and data-centric bank,” said Thwaite. “Armed with high-quality data, we can persist in subtly revolutionising the way we assist our customers through AI and other technologies.”
The project is also expected to streamline internal functions such as onboarding processes and risk or regulatory reporting. While NatWest has not disclosed financial terms, the focus remains on increasing agility across its 20 million customer relationships. The bank has not addressed whether the initiative will result in job losses, though internal sources suggest workforce reductions are not a core aspect of the programme.
NatWest’s announcement comes amid intensified digital competition across the UK banking sector. Institutions are under growing pressure to modernise infrastructure, in part due to diminishing interest-based revenue and the rise of nimble fintech challengers. Lloyds Banking Group, for example, has recently advanced its own AI and cloud efforts — migrating core systems to Google Cloud and rolling out enterprise-wide generative AI tools.
However, industry modernisation is not without risk. The 2018 TSB outage remains a cautionary tale, highlighting potential operational vulnerabilities tied to large-scale system transitions. UK regulators, including the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority, have also flagged systemic concerns about heavy reliance on a small number of cloud providers.
