How NatWest is co-creating with IBM Client Engineering on its Generative AI Journey to Bring More Value for Customers

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Following the recent announcement that NatWest and IBM are collaborating on a Generative AI initiative leveraging IBM’s enterprise AI platform watsonx, this article explores how the two organisations are exploring innovative technology, moving fast and achieving their ambitious strategy. Their secret? Getting everyone in one room with IBM Client Engineering. 

Beccy Henderson is responsible for innovation of Cora (NatWest’s industry-leading digital assistant), through her team: Future Initiatives. She and her team conduct market trend and competitor analysis to understand where NatWest want to take Cora over the next five years. Together with IBM, she’s created a vision and accompanying architecture for the future of Cora that will provide customers with an enhanced, accessible experience.

The IBM Client Engineering team, who help clients de-risk innovation through rapid, collaborative four-week projects, have been supporting Beccy and her team in proving out parts of the vision with a number of proof of concepts using watsonx. Natalie Denyer, Director of UKI Client Engineering, sat down with Beccy to hear about two projects and her experience of working with the team.

Natalie: Before we jump into talking about the projects the IBM Client Engineering team has been supporting you on, I’d be interested to get your take on what AI means for Cora and the experience NatWest delivers to customers.

Beccy: AI allows us to offer an ‘always on’ experience for our customers, whereby they can have support from Cora 24/7. We saw this was particularly impactful during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were waiting in telephony queues for extended periods. Implementing additional capability in Cora meant we were able to give customers the support they needed quickly.

Also, what’s exciting [about the development of AI] is that we’re able to move away from that traditional chatbot and create an ‘integrated experience’. This means we not only offer the customer information (in a conversational style), but we can help the customer achieve things [through the chat window], by doing things on their behalf – whether that’s cancelling direct debits or changing their address. This means the customer doesn’t have to go off and find out how to do it themselves.

Natalie: Excellent, it’s great to hear how NatWest is embracing AI to help customers more effectively. Perhaps you could tell me why you felt it was useful for you to engage with Client Engineering.

Beccy: We have a really ambitious strategy for the next few years: we want Cora to become a full virtual assistant, which means being able to support customers through end-to-end life moments and financial needs. To do that there’s a whole host of technology that needs to be implemented, data that needs to be brought in and experience that needs to be contributed. We also want to be present across multiple channels, such as web and mobile, which requires tailoring content for each.

Engaging IBM – especially Client Engineering – is allowing us to really understand and explore how we’re going to deliver that strategy. The IBM team have the product and delivery experience and pairing that with NatWest’s knowledge of their customers has allowed us to explore new technologies and get to the conclusions we need to.

I’ve worked in an innovative role at NatWest for four years and we’ve never delivered such value this quickly. I feel confident we’re working on the right things and we’re doing it in a efficient way, which is going to help us achieve that ambitious strategy.

Natalie: That’s great to hear. Perhaps you could elaborate a little bit further on the two projects that you’ve been working on with us specifically in the AI space recently.

Beccy: The first project we’ve been working on is a bespoke tool called the ‘Natural Conversation Framework’ (NCF), which has involved re-designing Cora’s interaction model. It uses a ‘Conversation UX Design’ concept from IBM Research, which strives to achieve a more natural conversation style. For example, the assistant can repeat things, paraphrase things, and give examples, as well as break information down into bite-sized chunks. This aligns with our strategy to transform Cora into a ‘voice first’ assistant (to best support accessibility).

The NCF tool we’ve built with Client Engineering allows NatWest to deliver accessible content and journeys for our customers in a much more scalable way. Today we have specialists who work with Watson to build content, which means we have a multi-step process of talking to business areas to gather content, before designing the conversation. What the NCF tool allows us to do is empower business areas to write their own content, using this natural framework – resulting in much quicker, agile content delivery.

Interestingly, we’ve looked at doing this every year for the last two or three years, but collaborating with Client Engineering has allowed us to focus on how we take the IBM Research asset and weave it into our business requirements to build something bespoke and meaningful for NatWest as a business.

The other project we’ve been working on has been focused on transforming Cora into a trusted, safe, intuitive ‘financial coach’, where we can support customers through life moments, such as saving for a holiday or planning for retirement. This is where we’ve been exploring the latest generative AI innovations.

Natalie: Great. It sounds like this combination of IBM and NatWest expertise has allowed you to explore some exciting ideas. I know you’ve brought the teams together in the IBM office recently. Did that help you move quickly too?

Beccy: Yes, there were so many different benefits to working in person. For the ‘financial coach’ project we spent a few days in Edinburgh and achieved a huge amount of work in comparison to what we would’ve achieved on Zoom calls. All being in one room, with time blocked out to focus, allowed us to pivot extremely quickly when something wasn’t viable. You also form a ‘one-team’ dynamic quickly where there’s trust, which helps on these types of projects.

I also think, on a broader note, since working with the Client Engineering team we’ve witnessed a change in the way we innovate. Client Engineering’s culture of experimentation, collaboration, agility, and speed have become key parts of our practice because of the benefits we’ve seen.

Natalie: I love that concept you were talking about around ‘failing fast’; it’s so important when you’re going on a journey. So now that you’ve completed these two proof of concepts, what’s next for these initiatives?

Beccy: We see the NCF tooling as the foundation we need to take Cora to the next level over the next few years – it’s going to drive so many internal efficiencies. So we’re delivering that at the beginning of next year.

For the ‘financial coach’ aspect, we are now exploring a second phase of the project with Client Engineering to look at what a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) journey is for the customer, so that we can start to roll it out. We’d also like to make our customer’s engagements with ‘coach’ Cora as personalised as possible, by incorporating “Banking my way”. This is the bank’s initiative to allow customers to record information about support or adjustments they need to make banking easier, be that accessibility, visual or hearing needs.

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To find out more about NatWest and IBM’s collaboration, read this article.