Category: AI

Wendy Redshaw, chief digital information officer (CDIO) at NatWest Retail Bank, has had a distinguished career leading technology-led change in some of the world’s biggest financial services organisations. Now, she’s using that experience to drive even more innovation.

After four years as CIO for collaborative technology solutions with Deutsche Bank, Redshaw says she was eager to work for a UK finance house. In late 2018, she found the perfect home at NatWest as head of technology and digital distribution for the personal bank.

“The opportunity was interesting because NatWest was ready for digital transformation but wasn’t naturally sitting in a leadership position at that time,” she says. “The role allowed me to land and think about what to do. I found an organisation that was fundamentally focused on its customers and perhaps had less digital experience in-house.”

After working with her team to deliver technological improvements across the personal bank offline and online, Redshaw moved into the CDIO position in February 2020. “It wasn’t just because I wanted a longer acronym than most technologists,” she jokes.

“We created the role so we could sew together business and technology because, as with many organisations, technology had historically been something that happened over there, and the business did their thing, and then they would give the technologists something to work on. We wanted better integration.”

Embracing digital change

Redshaw says the creation of her CDIO role in 2020 was a public statement that NatWest wanted to create a partnership approach to technology and business: “This is a digital bank in the making, and hopefully, with the results that we’ve seen, we’ve achieved our aims.”

The technological transformation in banking services that Redshaw oversees at NatWest today differs greatly from the finance industry she joined as a software engineer in 1987.

“We didn’t call it digital then,” she says. “I remember the focus was on, ‘How do we use technology to make things quicker, simpler and more secure for our customers?’” She points to work on a security module for the London Stock Exchange and the beginning of the settlement systems CHAPS and Euroclear.

“There was a lot of change where technology was being brought in, but it was more for the underpinning services than for the consumer-facing areas,” she says, before fast-forwarding to the present-day bank. “Over that time, we’ve seen that digital is now in the hands of our retail customers.”

Redshaw says the shift in technological focus also helped prompt her switch to the retail side of banking. After a career driving behind-the-scenes IT changes in major firms, such as Lloyds TSB, Barclays Capital and Royal Bank of Scotland, her current role at NatWest is focused on delivering innovative customer services.

“That’s where the exciting stuff is happening. Yes, of course, we use AI across several areas of the organisation – something like 17% of our models are AI-based now, such as for controlling fraud, financial crime and so on,” she says.

“However, in terms of affecting human beings, digital services are at our customers’ fingertips. If you think about my driver for going into the CDIO role, the customer is where I thought I’d have the most impact.”

Delivering pioneering innovations

As CDIO, Readshaw is directly accountable to the group CIO and retail banking CEO. Responsible for digital operations leadership, she manages 4,500 people across four locations globally and leads the delivery of retail banking technology for Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank North.

Redshaw’s team is digitalising services to make life easier for the group’s customers. Their work is supported by a planned investment of £3.5bn from 2023 to 2025, with more than 70% of spending targeted at data and technology.

NatWest has 10.9 million digitally active retail and business banking customers and 3.5 million use online banking platforms. The hard work continues apace. In 2024, Redshaw led the launch of a retail banking app on Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset.

One of her proudest achievements is the introduction of generative AI (GenAI) into the bank’s conversational assistant, Cora. She says the bank made an early move into chatbots. Cora was introduced in 2017. The technology could answer basic questions, but Redshaw wanted it to do more.

“When I joined in 2018, I realised it was quite a good channel to do something with,” she says. “I had some grand ambitions for her – things like digital avatars having a voice, and all these engaging ways of doing things. I said, ‘Look, I see this particular technology being something we could get moving on’.”

Redshaw saw that, while machine learning technology was progressing at pace, it wasn’t quite ready for the giant leap in digital experiences she envisioned. However, the public release of generative AI models in late 2022 helped turn theory into a practical reality. Working with experts from IBM’s client engineering team to develop the initial proof of concept, NatWest launched its next-generation assistant, Cora+, in June 2024.

Cora+ is a multichannel platform that securely accesses data from multiple sources, including products, services and banking information. The virtual assistant technology is powered by IBM’s Watsonx Assistantand built on IBM Cloud. Estimates suggest the technology is creating a 150% improvement in satisfaction for some customer queries.

“It was the perfect example of an interest in technology, an interest in people, and an interest in delivering business value,” she says. “I feel very excited about how we’ve taken something that just answered questions and moved into generative AI at scale for millions of customers. And it’s only the first step. I’ve got big ambitions for what I want to do with that technology.”

Building strong partnerships

Cora+ uses ChatGPT 3.5 alongside an unnamed GPT large language model (LLM). The second model is trained to judge the output of the first model. While the GPT models play an important role in NatWest’s digital strategy, the organisation is eager to keep an open approach to AI and innovation.

Redshaw says the group wants to avoid being locked into a specific LLM. She wants the capability to swap from large to small language models (SLMs). Organisations can use SLMs to derive outputs from constrained amounts of data that require less computing power, which is important for a big business like NatWest that wants to meet sustainability targets.

“As a result, it was a case of, ‘OK IBM, we like working with you, but we want to be able to switch the language models in and out depending on the business requirement’,” she says. “And they were like, ‘Absolutely’. So, that’s great. We have the same mindset around using the best of everything to get value for our customers safely.”

“This is a digital bank in the making, and hopefully, with the results that we’ve seen, we’ve achieved our aims”

Wendy Redshaw, NatWest Retail Bank

In addition to the work on Cora+, Redshaw and her colleagues are analysing how AI can boost customer experiences in other areas. NatWest has worked with IBM to develop a digital legal assistant powered by GenAI. This tool streamlines contract management and enhances accessibility, especially for neurodivergent users. The tool supports colleagues with compliance checks, producing 20% efficiency gains.

More generally, Redshaw is proud her team completes thousands of releases annually. The department’s focus on micro-projects is as important as delivering large-scale initiatives and helps NatWest hit tight transformation deadlines. Across all projects, IBM acts as a key technology partner, with Redshaw suggesting the nature of the long-term working relationship with the tech giant is like interacting with people on the internal team.

John Duigenan, distinguished engineer and general manager of the global financial services industry at IBM, says shifting to constant innovation, experimentation, and learning is typical of the work his company sees in its most pioneering clients. “We got to work with a trusted partner, and we got to learn together,” he said, referring to IBM’s relationship with NatWest.

“It’s great we co-create approaches to using technology and collaborate on innovation. Our teams blend incredibly well, and we deliver together in new ways. We have an approach that says, ‘We know why this work will matter for all of us because we can measure the impact’.”

Providing new experiences

Redshaw reflects on achievements during the past few years. While the benefits of the digital transformation she’s enacted at NatWest are clear, there’s always an opportunity to do more.

She says the rapid pace of transformation makes it difficult to predict with any degree of certainty what will happen next: “What will the success metrics be in three years? We won’t be judged on the same metrics because digital banking is changing quickly.”

However, she expects to see developments in some key areas. “In the AI space, I expect to see more voice,” she says. “At the moment, Cora listens to our telephony and sends a text, a deep link, or something else that’s required. In the future, I think it’ll probably answer the phone and deal with questions.”

Redshaw also expects progress in text-based answering. Her bank’s research suggests people in financial difficulties often prefer having a guilt-free conversation with a bot rather than a human. “I would expect something in that financial health and support space that uses natural language,” she says.

There’s even the potential for advances in unexpected areas. Redshaw says she’s keen to add Cora to ATMs, something that she was previously told was impossible.

“I’ve now spoken to some innovation engineers, and they’ve said they think it might be possible,” she says. “So, I suspect we will see something like a digital point of presence.”

Finally, Redshaw expects the bank to continue honing its approach to mobile. “People now have their bank in their pocket,” she says. “I imagine we will give more richness and engagement through these devices. Even though our mobile strategy is great, I think it will lean towards more engagement and personalisation during the next 24 months.”

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